To Have Or To Be

Tlii« Book is a

GIFT

To Our Library

I Erich I'romm is rccogniscti as one ol the worhi’s most inli'iciitial ami S>nlliiui!

t thinkers on psychological, philosoplncal and social issues, liorii in (icrmaiiy,

I he studied at the Universities of Heidelberg and Munieli and at tlie

; Psychoanalytic Institute in Heiint. Alter Ictiving (jenmmy in l't32, he taught

} in Mexico, where he was Ih-olessor ol’ Psydioanaly.sis at the National

University, and in the United Stales at Heimington College, Yale, Michigan
I State and New York Universitie:;. Erich E'roinnt ilied in March 19K(1.

from:

BEYOND THE CHAINS OF ILLUSION
GREATNESS AND LIMITATIONS OF FREUD’S THOUGHT

iAO'

, i '■ T

; ICN)...'■■

'Tqa.l

First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Id i’CK

Copyright © Erich Idunm I<176

Postscript copyright © Ruth Nanda Arisheii iv)7(>
ABACUS edition first published in l'J7‘)
by Sphere Rooks l„td

30/32 Gray’s Inn Road, l,,ondon W( '1X Sil
Reprinted 1979 (twice). 1980, l‘)81, ml PtH-l. I')S5
A volume in the World Perspective Series, phmncd ond
edited by Ruth Nanda Anshen, published in the Hum! Stau ^
of America by Harper di Row, Publishers, Inc.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall mil, by \v;iv o!
trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or othei wise eiictd.itmi
without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of bimlin.i' or ciivta'
Other than that in which it is published and without a similar coiiditioy
including this condition being imposed on the Hubsei|ueiii ppirhama,

Set in Intertype Baskerville

Printed and bound in (heat Britain by
Cox (it Wyman Ltd, Readini’

Contents

Foreword ^

Introduction: The Clreut JTomisc, It's Kailiire, niid
New Alterntilivcs
The .i'hid of tin Illusion
Why Did tlte (Ireat Promise Fail?

The Ficonoinic Necessity iitr lluniart Chatsyy:
is There an Alternative lo OatasU' 0 |ti!v:?

PARK),ME IINlIldlS'l'ANriiNfl THF. i'dl M:ui:.\t T
TETWKFN HAVING AND iddNG

I. A Fir.st Gianct;

The Itni'iorfttnc.e id'the Dillia'cnee Irctwccn

llaviiio, tind Peiti;-

I'Aainplc:-; in Variitir; Pot:(ie FxjtnrGoi):;

Idiottialic Ghauf,

Orit»in of die Ti-rnis
Fliilosojihical (: of IF-ino'
flavinp; ;md {Anaioiiiti';

II. Ilaviiui; and IGiiis', in D.iily IGpi-iicnci;

I a-atnin;;

Kcniomlmring

Gonvenaup,

Readiu",

IGoreisit!*; Atitliority

Ilavinyj KnowlrHlpy; and Ktittwing

Faitli

I.oviu!''

HI, Ihivinp, and Hein", in flit; Old .and New j);'!

'IV'iianient-. ,ind in ihc WrifingH rrf
Ahiili't F.chiiai't
" 'I’he Old ‘li'U.intent
'I he Nmv’I e.-aattinit
Fla;,ter Kckhait ftvthO'f.

PART TWO ANALYSING THE FUNDAMENTAL
DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE TWO MODES OF
EXISTENCE

IV, What Is the Having Mode? 75

The Acquisitive Society - Basis for the Having
Mode

The Nature of Having

Other Factors Supporting the Having Mode

The Having Mode and the Anal Character

Asceticism and Equality

Existential Having

V. What Is the Being Mode? 91

Being Active
Activity and Passivity
Being as Reality

The Will to Give, to Share, to Sacrifice
VI Further Aspects of Having and Being no

Security - Insecurity
Solidarity - Antagonism
Joy “ Pleasure
Sin and Forgiveness
Fear of Dying - Affirmation of Living
Here, Now “■ Past, Future

PART THREE THE NEW MAN AND THE NEW
SOCIETY

VII. Religion, Character, and Society 133

The Foundations of Social Character
Social Character and ‘Religious’ Needs
Is the Western World Christian?

The Humanist Protest

VIII. Conditions for Human Change and the

Features of the New Man 165

The New Man

IX. Features of the New Society 170

A New Science of Man
The New Society: Is There a Reasonable
Chance ?

Appendix WORLD PERSPECTIVES WHAT THIS

SERIES MEANS

198

Ruth Nanda Anshen

Bibliography

209

Index

217

To Way to do is to be.

Lao-tse

People should not consider so much what
they are to do, as what they are.

Master Egkhart

The less you are and the less you express of
your life - the more you have and the
greater is your alienated life.

Karl Marx

Foreword

This book follows two trends of my previous writings. First, it
extends the development of my work in radical-humanistic
psychoanalysis, concentrating on the analysis of selfishness
and altruism as two basic character orientations. The last
third of the book. Part Three, then carries further a theme I
dealt with in The Sane Society and The Revolution of
Hopei the crisis of contemporary society and possibilities
for its solution. Repetitions of previously expressed thoughts
have been unavoidable, but I hope the new viewpoint from
which this small work is written and its extended concepts
will compensate even readers who are familiar with my pre¬
vious writing.s.

Actually, the title of this book and two earlier titles are
almost identical: Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having, and
Balthasar Staehelin, Haben und iSein (Having and Being).
All three books are written in the spirit of humanism, but
approach the subject in very different ways: Marcel writes
from a theological and philosophical standpoint; Staehelin’s
book is a constructive discussion of materialism in modern
science and a contribution to Wirklichkeitsanalyse; this
volume deals with an empirical psychological and social
analysis of the two modes of existence. I recommend the
books by Marcel and Staehelin to readers who are
sufficiently interested in the topic. (I did not know of the
existence of a published English translation of Marcel’s book
until recently and read it instead in an excellent English
translation prepared for my private use by Beverley Flughes.
The published version is the one cited in the Bibliography.)

In the interest of making this a more readable book, its
footnotes were reduced to a bare rainimura, both in number
and in length. While some book references appear in par¬
entheses in the text, exact references are to be found in the
Bibliography.

Another point of style that I want to clarify concerns the

0

use of generic ‘man’ and ‘he’. I believe I have avoided all
‘male-oriented’ language, and I thank Marion Odomirok for
convincing me that the use of language in thi.s re.spect is far
more important than I used to thiriL On one point only
have we been unable to agree in our approach to .sexi.sni in
language, namely in respect to the word ‘man’ jis the term of
reference for the species Homo sapiens, lire use of ‘man’ in
this context, without differentiation of .sex, has a long tradi¬
tion in humanist thinking, and I do not believe we can do
without a word that denotes i clearly the human species
character. No such difficulty exists in the German language:
one uses the word Mensch to refer to the non-.sex-
differentiated being. But even in English the word ‘man’ i.s
used in the same sex-undifferentiated way as the German
MenrcA, as meaning human being or the human race. I
think it is advisable to restore its non-sexual meaning to the
word ‘man’, _ rather than substituting awkward-.sounding
words. In this book I have capitalised ‘Man’ in order to
clarify my non-sex-differentiated use of the term.

There remains now only the pleasant ta,sk of expre.ssing
my thanks to the several persohs who have contributed tii
the content and style of this book. First of all, I want to
thank Rainer Funk, who was of great helf) to me in more
than one respect: in long discussions he helped my under¬
standing of fine points of Christian theology; lie was un¬
tiring in pointing to literature in the field of theology he
read the manu.script several times and his excellent con¬
structive suggestions as well as his critique helped greatly to
enrich the manuscript and to eliminate some errors. I am
most grateful to Marion Odomirok for greatly himroving
this book by her sensitive editing. My thanks also go to Joan
Hughe.s who conscientiously and patiently typed ami re¬
typed the numerous versions of the rnamiscript and made
many excellent smggestions as to style and language. Finally.

I thank Annis Iromra, who read the maimscript in its sev¬
eral versions and always responded with many vuliuilile in-
sights and suggestions.

New York
June ig^6

10

Introduction; The Great Promise,
Its Failure, and New Alternatives

The E?id of an Illusion

Tlie Great Promise of Unlimited Progress - the promise of
domination of natni'e, of material abundance, of the greatest
happiness for the greatest number, and of unimpeded per¬
sonal freedom - has sustained the hopes and faith of the
generations since the Iieginning of the industrial age. To be
sure, our civilisation began when the human race started
taking active control of nature; but that control remained
limited until the advent of the industrial age. With industrial
progres.s, from tlic substitution of mechanical and then nu¬
clear energy for animal and human energy to the suli-
stitution of tlie computer for the human mind, we could feel
that we were on our way to unlimited production and,
hence, unlimited consunijition; that teclmiqne made us om¬
nipotent; that science made us omniscient. We were on our
way to becoming gods, supreme beings who could create a
second world, using the natural world only as building
blocks for our new creation.

Men and, increasingly, women experienced a new sense of
freedom; they !)ecame masters of their own lives: feudal
chains liad been broken and one could do wliat one wished,
fre(} of all shackles. Or so [jeople felt. And even thoiigli this
was true only for the upper and middle classes, their achieve¬
ment could lead otinu's to the faitli that eventually the new
freetlom could he extended to all incmlrers of society, pro¬
vided industrialisation kept up its pace. Socialism and corn-
munisiu tjuir:kly changt'd from a movement whose aim was a
new .society and a new man into one wlio.se ideal was a bour¬
geois life for ;dl, the unwemlised bouriaois as tlie men and
women of tlie future. Tlie achievement of wealth and
comfort ffir all was .suj)po.sed to result in unrestricted hap-
pine.ss for all. The trinity of unlimited production, absolute
freedom, and unrestricted happiness formed tlie nucleus of a

n

new religion, Progress, and a new Eartlily City cif Prn'frcisH
was to replace the City of God. It is not at all astunishiiifj
that this new religion provided its believens witli ('nergy, vi¬
tality, and hope.

The grandeur of the Great Promise, the marvelk,nis
material and intellectual achievements of the industrial ap,e,
must be visualised in order to understand (lit' trauma that
realisation of its failure is producing today. I'or the indus-
trial age has indeed failed to fulfil its Great iTomise, and
evergrowing numbers of people are becoming aware that:

® Unrestricted satisfaction of all desires is not conducive
to welUeing, nor is it the way to happiness or evtm to ntaj^i*
mum pleasure.

« The dream of being independent master;; i>{ our livrss
ended when we began awakening to the fact that we Imve ail
become cogs^ in the bureaucialic machine, with our
thoughts, feelings, and tastes manijmlated by ft'^veiniueut
and industry and the mass communications tliat diey {'on-
trol. ^

» Economic progress has remained re.stdcted to the ricli
nations, and the gap between rich and poor nations lias ever
widened.

• Technical progress itself has created ecological danger
and the dangers of nuclear war, either or lioth of whicli may
put an end to all civilisation and po.ssibly to ail life.

When he carne to 0 .slo to accept the NobclPriw* for I'tvi
(1952), Albert Schweitzer challenged the world ‘to dtue ■
ace the situation.... Man has become a .superman.... iJ,
fe supeman wit the superhmnan power has not risen :
the level of superhuman reason. To the dcRree to which h
power grows he becomes more and more a poor man...
mt shde up our conscience that wc become all the moi
mliuman the more we grow into .supermen.’

I

t

I

I

I

Why Did the Great Promise Fail?

s,waj5 built into the industrial

.system fiy its two main I’lsycliological premises: (i) that 1:hc
aim of life is hai)pine.s.s, that is, iria.\inium pleasure, defined as
the satisfaction of any desire or subjective need a [lersnu may
feei {radical hedanism); (a) that egotism, sellislmess, and
grectl, a.s the .system needs to generate them in order to func¬
tion, lead to harmony and peace.

It is well known that the rich lliroughout history prac¬
tised radical hedonism. T'liose of unlimited means, siicli as
the elite of Rome, of Ifidiaii citie.s of the Renaissance, and of
England and Eraiiee in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen¬
turies, tried to (iiid a me:iniiig to life in unlimited pleasure.
Rut while ma.ximum phsisuiu in the sense of radical hedon¬
ism was tlie practice ol cm lain groups at certain times, with
l)Ut a single exception prior to the seventeenth century, it
was never the theory of well-lieing exjiresscd liy tlie great
Masters of Living in Gliina, India, the Near East, and
Kurojic,

T’lie one exce|}tion is the Gret'k jihilosoplier Aristi|)pus, ti
pujiil of Soerat(‘s (first half of (he fourth century iso), who
taught tliat to experience an optimum of liodily jilcasure is
the goal oflife mKl that hajipiness is tlie sum total ol pleasums
enjoyed, llie little we know of liis |)hiloso|)liy we owe to
Diogenes l-aertius, hut it is enough to reveal Aristippus as
the only real hedonist, for wliom the existence of a desire is
the Irasis for the riglit to satisfy it and thus to realise the goal
of life: Pleasure.

Kjricurus can hardly he legarded as represemtative of Ar¬
istippus’ kiiitl of hedonism. While lor h|')ie.urus ‘pure
pleasure is the highest ffoid, for him tliis plisisun' meant ‘ah-
.sence of jrain’ iajinnia) and stillness ul the .soul {(it(ir(ixia)»
Aecording to Epicurus, pleasure as satislaciion ol a desire
camiot he the aim of life, becaust* siieli ple:isure is necessarily
followed by impleasure and llnis keeps humanity away from
its real goal of absence of iiain. (Epicurus’ theory resemirle.s
I'n.-utl'r, in many way.s.) Nevertheless, it sctmis tliat Epicurus
represented a cerftiin kind of snbjtx'tivism ctmtrary^ to
Aristotle's position, as far as llit' coutriidictory reports on Epi¬
curus’ slateirieut peiiiiil a dcliiiiie inieipretation.

None of iIh* niher gicai M.caers taught tliat the jactual
existence of a deshe uni\tittiled an eikkal norm. T'hey were

12

concerned with humankind’s optimal well-ht-ing (?•/?.’(?</
bene), The essential element in their thinking- is the dis¬
tinction between those needs (desires) that am onlj' sii!)-
jectively felt and whose satisfaction leads to moueiary
pleasure, and those needs that are rooted in human iiatine
and whose realisation is conducive to human growth and
produces eudaimonia, i,e. ‘well-being’. In other words, they
were concerned with the dkinction betwem piirdy sub¬
jectively felt needs and objectively valid needs - jrart of the
former being harmful to human growth and the lattt'r being
in accordance with the requirements of human natui e.

The theory that the aim of life is the fulfilment of every
human desire was clearly voiced, for tlie first time since Ai-
istippus, by philosophers in the seventeenth ;ind eighteenth
centuries. It was a concept that would easily arist; when
‘profit’ ceased to mean ‘profit for the soul’ (as it docs in the
Bible and, even later, in Spinoza), but came to mean
material, monetary profit, in the jreriod wiicn the middh;
class threw away not only its political shacikles but tdso all
bonds of love and solidarity and believed tliat btnng only for
oneself meant being more rather then less oneself. For
Hobbes happiness is the continuous progress from oik; greed
{cupiditas) to another; La Mettrie even rect.iinmcnds tirugs
as giving at least the illusion of liappiness; for de Hade the
satisfaction of cruel impulses is legitimate, precisely Itccause
they exist and crave satisfaction. These were thirikcrs whti
lived in the age of the bourgeois class’s final victory. Wliat
had been the imphilosophical practices of aristocmis'lxrcanit*
the practice and theory of the bourgeoisie.

^ Many ethical theories have been developixl since the
eighteenth century - some were more respec.iahle forms t.f
hedonism, such'as Utilitarianism; others weio strictly anfi-
.hedonistic:systems, ,such,as those of Kant, Marx, T'horeau,
and Schweitzer. Yet the present era, by and large since the
end of the First World War, has returned to the })rarlice and
theory of radical hedoni.sra. The concept of unlimited
pleasure forms a strange contradiction to tht! ideal rif di.s-
ciplined w^ork, similar to the contradiction between the ac-
ceptance of an obsessional work ethic and the ideal of
complete laziness during the rest of the day and during va¬

cations, The endless assembly line belt and the bureaucratic
routine on tlie one hand, and television, the automobile, and
sex on the other, make the contradictory combination pos¬
sible. Olisessional work alone would drive people just as
crazy as would complete laziness. Witli the combination,
they can live. Besides, botli contradiction attitudes cor-
resjrond to an economic necessity: twentieth-century capi¬
talism is basctl on maximal consumption of the goods and
.services [iroduced as well as on routinised teamwork.

Theoretical considerations demonstrate that radical he¬
donism cannot lead to ha|)piness as wadi as why it cannot do
,so, given human nature. But even without theoretical
analysis the oliservalile data show most clearly tliat our kind
of ‘pursuit of haiqiiness’ does not produce well-being. We arc
a society of notoriously unlia|)py pcoiile: lonely, anxious, de-
])re.s,sed, destructive, dependent - jieoplc who are glad when
we have killed lire time we are trying .so hard to save.

Ours is the griratest social exireriment ever made to solve
the ({uestiou whether jrleusure (as a passive adect in contrast
to the active ali'eci, w<dl-l)eing and joy) can be a satisfactory
answer tu the jrroblem of human existence. For tire first time
in history the satisfaction of tire pleasure drive is not only tire
jrrivilege of a minority but it is possilrle for more than half
the po|)ulation. In the industrialised countries the experi¬
ment has already answered the cpicstion in tire negative.

The second irsycliolugic.'il premise of llrt; industrial age,
that the pursuit of individual egoism leads to harmony and
peace, growtli in everyone’s welfare, is ecjiurlly erroneirus on
theoretical grounds, and tigain its fallacy is proven by the
oliseivahlt' dtila. Why should tliis principle, which only one
of the grisrt clttssical economists, David Ricardo, rejected, lie
tnu‘? 'Fo Ik; an egoist refers not only to my behaviour tint to
my cliaraeter. ft means: that I want everything fonnyself;
that possessing, not sharing, gives me pleasure; that I must
lieconie greedy because if my aim is having, I mn more the
mort* I htwe'i that I must IVel antagonistic towards till
Olliers: my cnstomeis wlrom I want to deceive, my emu-
pelilors wiioni 1 wamt to destroy, my wfirkers whom I want
to exjiloil. ! etui iK'ver lie satisfital, liecause tiiere is no end to
my wishes; I must he envious of those who have more and

afraid of those who have less. But I have to repress all these
feelings in order to represent myself (to others us well as to
myself) as the smiling, rational, sincere, kind human being
everybody pretends to be.

The passion for having must lead to never-eiifling class
war. The pretence of the communists that their system will
end class struggle by abolishing classes is fiction, for their
sy.stem is based on the principle of unlimited consumption as
the goal of living. As long as everybody wants to have more,
there must be formations of classes, there must 1;k' cI.'ihs war,
and in global terms, there must be inlernationai war. (hrcd
and peace preclude each other,

Radical hedonism and unlimited egotism could not Itave
emerged as guiding principles of economic Ireliavionr Intti
not a drastic change occurred in the eighteenth cenfmy. In
medieval society, as in many other highly developed as well
as primitive societies, economic behaviour was determined
by ethical principles. Thus for the .scholastic theoi(»gi;ins,
such economic categories as price and private {iropert}' weri*
part of moral theology. Granted that the theologians Imintl
formulations to adapt their moral code to the new (‘eononiiit
demands (for instance Thomas Aquinas’ tjualification to the
concept of ’just price’); neverthele.ss, economic ht'Imvtoitr re¬
mained human behaviour and, hence, was subject to tlie
values of humanistic ethics, Through a uuinber of steps
eighteenth-century capitalism underwent a radical cltangt*:
economic behaviour became separate from elliics .and
human values. Indeed, the economic machine was su|)posed
to be an autonomous entity, independent of human neetls
and human will. It was a system that ran by itself and ac¬
cording to its own laws. The snfiering of tlu! workers as well
as the destruction of an ever-increasing number of smaller
enterprises for the sake of the growth of ever larger cor¬
porations was an economic necessity that one might regnl,
but that one had to accept as if it were the outcome of a
natural law.

The development of this economic system was no longer
determined by the question: What is good for Man? fjut by
the question: What is good for the growth of the systm?
One tried to hide the sharpness of this conflict by making the

i6

assumption that: wlmt was good for the growth of the system
(or even for a single big corporation) was also good for the
peo|)le. 'I'bis cousti'uciion was bolstered by an auxiliary con¬
struction: that the very ciualities tlial: the system retjuired of
human Ireings - (‘gotism, selfishness, and greed - were innate
in human miture; lienct', not only tire system but human
nature itself fostered ili<‘in. .Societies in which egotism,
selhsliness, and greed did not exist were supposed to be
‘primitive’, llieir in!iai)itanls ‘childlike’. People refused to
recognise that iliere traits were not n:itnral drives that
caused industrial society l(! exist, but that they were the pro¬
ducts of social circumstances.

Not least in imj)orianc(“ is another factor: people’s relation
to nature Ijccame di'(‘[)ly hostile. Being ‘freaks of nature’ wlio
by the very conditions of nur existence are within nature and
l.)y the gift of our reason transcend it, w'e liavc tried to solve
nur existential [irolilem liy ‘dving iqi the Messianic vision of
harmony between humankintl and nature liy conquering
iiaaure, by transforming it to our own purposes until the
conquest lias liecnme more ;md more (‘quiv.'ilent to de¬
struction. Our spirit of contpiest and hostility has hliiidixi us
to the facts dnit rmlural resources liave their limits and can
ftvcutmdly lie exhausted, and that nature will light back
against liuinau rapaciousuess.

fndustriai society has contempt for nature " as well as for
.'dl things not machiiii'-mttde and lor till pisiple who are not
macliine makers (die non-white races, with the u'cenl excep¬
tions of japan and Ohina). Pcu|)lc tire attmclcd (odtiy to the
mechaiiicnl, the |)owcrlul machine, the lifi'lcss, and ever in-
crctisingly to destruction.

The Kmiomk Necessity for 11 iiman Change

Thus far ilit; argument liere litis lieen that the^ character
Irtiils engendered liy om soeioet'onomic systtmi, i.e. by our
wtiy of living, tun patliogeitie tmd ewnfutilly ])i'oduee a sick
person and, thus, a sick society. 'I'here is, however, ti si'coikI
ainument from an eniiinly dillereiit viewpoint in taunii ol
[jcofound jisvchologiea! diaing’s in Man as tin tilteinatiw' to
nconomic and ecxilitgietd (xittislrophe, It is raised in two

reports commissioned by the Club of Rome, one by D. H.
Meadows et al., the other by M. D, Mesarovic and E. Pestel.
Both reports deal with the technological, economic, and
population trends on a world scale. Mesarovic and Pestel
conclude that only drastic economic and technological
changes on a global level, according to a master plan, can
‘avoid major and ultimately global catastrophe’, and the
data they array as proof of their thesis are based on the most
global and systematic research that has been made so far.
(Their book has certain methodological advantages over
Meadows’s report, but that earlier study considers even more
drastic economic changes as an alternative to catastrophe.)
Mesarovic and Pestel conclude, furthermore, that such eco¬
nomic changes are possible only hi/ fundamental changes in
the values and attitudes of man occur [or as I would call It, in
human character orientation], such as a new ethic and a new
attitude towards nature’ (emphasis added). What they are
saying confirms only what others have said before and since
their report was published, that a new society is possible only
if, in the process of developing it, a new human being also
' develops, or in more modest terms, if a fundamental change
(.)ccurs in contemporary Man’s character structure.

, Unfortunately, the two reports are written in the spirit of
quantification, abstraction, and depersonalisation so charac¬
teristic of our time, and besides that, they neglect completely
all political and social factors, without which no realistic
plan can possibly be made. Yet they present valuable data,
and for the first time deal with the economic situation of the
human race as a whole. Its possibilities and its dangers. Their
conclusion, that a new ethic and a new attitude toward.s
nature are necessary, is all the more valuable because this
demand is so contrary to their philosophical premises.

At the other end of the gamut stands E. F. Schumacher,
who is also an economist, but at the .same time a radical
humanist. His demand for a radical human change is ba.sed
on two arguments: that our pre.sent .social order makes u.s
sick, and that we are headed for an economic catastrophe
unless we radically change our social system,

The need for profound human change emerges not only a.s
an ethical or religious demand, not only as a psychological

demand arising from the pathogenic nature of our present
social character, but also as a condition for the sheer survival
of the human race. Right living is no longer only the
fulfilment of an ethical or religious demand. For the first
time in history the physical survival of the human race
depends on a radical change of the human heart. However, a
change of the human heart is possible only to the extent that
drastic economic and social changes occur that give the
human heart the chance for change and the courage and the
vision to achieve it.

Is There an Alternative to Catastrophe?

All tlie data mentioned so far are published and well known.
The almost unbelievable fact is that no serious effort is made
to avert what looks like a final decree of fate. While in our
private life nobody except a mad person would remain pass¬
ive in view of a threat to his total existence, those who are in
charge of public affairs do practically nothing, and those
who have entrusted their fate to them let them continue to
do nothing.

How is it poH,sible that the strongest of all instincts, that
for survival, seems to have ceased to motivate us? One of the
most obvious explanations is that the leaders undertake
many actions tliat make it possible for them to pretend tliey
are doing something effective to avoid a catastrophe: endless
conferences, resolutions, disarmament talks, all give the im-
pre.s.sion that the problenis are recognised and something is
being done to resolve them. Yet nothing of real importance
happens; l}ut l)oth the leaders and the led anaesthetise their
consciences and their wi.sh ft»r survival by giving the ap¬
pearance of knowing the I'oad and marching in the right
direction.

Another explanation is that tlie selfishness the system gen¬
erates makes leaders value personal success more highly than
social resi)onsibility. It is no longer shocking when political
leaders and business executives make decisions that seem to
be to their personal advantage, but at the .same time are
harmful and dangerous to the community. Indeed, if
selfishne.ss is one of the pillars of contemporary practical

TO

Part One

Understanding the Difference

I

A First Glance

The Importance of the Difference Between Having and
Being

The alternative of having versus being does not appeal to
connnon sense. I o have, so it would seem, is a normal func¬
tion of our life: in ordirr to live we must have things, More¬
over, we must have things in order to enjoy them. In a
culture in whiclr the su})reme goal is to have - and to have
more and more - and in wliicli one can sjreak of someone as
‘being worth a million dollars’, how can there be an alterna¬
tive between having and Ircing? On the contrary, it would
seem that the very essence of being is having; that if one has
notliing, one is nothing. , , ,

Yet the gtotit Masttu’s of living liave made trie alternative
between having and licing a central issue of their respective
systems. 'The liuddha leaclies that in order to arrive at the
highest stage of human develofiment, we inust not ciave
i)osse.ssions.\fesus teaches: ‘Tor whosoever will save his hie
.shall lose it; but wliosoever will lose his life lor my sake, the
same .shall .save it. Tor what is a man advantaged, if he gain
the whole world, and lose himself, or lie cast away?’ (Luke
Mastm I'V.khart taugilu that to have notlnng arid
make oneself ojieii and ‘enijity’, not to let ones ego stand in
one’s way, is the condition for achieving spiritiud wealth
and sti-ength. Marx lauglit that luxury is as much a vice as
poverty and that our gtml should be to he much, not to have
much. (1 reler here to the real Marx, tlu: radical huinani.st,
not to the vulgar forgery presented by Soviet communism.)

I'or many years 1 had lieen dergily impr'essed by this dis¬
tinction and was seeking its empirical Irasis in the concrete
study of individuals and groups by the psychoaimlydc
method. What 1 .saw has led me to conclude that this di.s-
tinciion, togetfier with that between love of life and love of
the dead, reiiresents the most crucial iiroblem td existence;
that empirical anthropological and psychoanalytic data tend

to demonstrate that having and being are two fundamental
modes of experience^ the respective strengths of which deter¬
mine the di§erences between the characters of individuals
and various types of social character.

Examples in Various Poetic Expressions

As an introduction to understanding the difference between
the having and being modes of existence, let me use as an
illustration two poems of similar content that the late D. T.
Suzuki referred to in ‘Lectures on Zen Buddhism’. One is a
haiku by a Japanese poet, Basho, 1644-1694; the other poem
is by a nineteenth-century English poet, Tennyson. Each
poet describes a similar experience: his reaction to a flower
he sees while taking a walk. Tennyson’s verse is:

Flower in a crannied wall,

I pluck you out of the crannies,

I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,

Little flower - but ?/1 could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,

I should know what God and man is.

Translated into English, Basho’s haiku runs something like
this:

When I look carefully
I see the nazuna blooming
By the hedge!

The difference is striking. Tennyson reacts to the flower
by wanting to have it. He ‘plucks’ it ‘root and all’. And while
he ends with an intellectual speculation about the flower’s
possible function for his attaining insight into the nature of
God and man, the flower itself is killed, as a result of his
interest in it, Tennyson, as we see him in his poem, may be
compared to the Western scientist who seeks the truth by
means of dismembering life.

Basho’s reaction to the flower is entirely different. He does
not want to pluck it; he does not even touch it. All he does is
look carefully’ to ‘see’ it. Here is Suzuki’s description;

It is likely that Basho was walking along a country road when
he noticed something rather neglected by the hedge. He then
approached closer, took a good look at it, and found it was no
less than a wild plant, rather insignificant and generally un¬
noticed by passersby. This is a plain fact described in the poem
with no specifically poetic feeling expressed anywhere except
perhaps in the last two syllables, which read in Japanese kana.
This particle, frequently attached to a noun or an adjective or
an adverb, signifies a certain feeling of admiration or praise or
sorrow or joy, and can sometimes quite approximately be
rendered into English by an exclamation mark. In the present
haiku the whole verse ends with this mark.

Tennyson, it appears, needs to possess the flower in order
to understand people and nature, and by his having it, the
flower is destroyed. What Basho wants is to see, and not only
to look at the flower, but to be at one, to ‘one’ himself with it
- and to let it live. The difference between Tennyson and
Basho is fully explained in this poem by Goethe;

Found

I walked in the woods
All by myself,

To seek nothing.

That was on my mind,

I saw in the shade
A little flower stand,

Bright like the stars
Like beautiful eyes.

I wanted to pluck it,

But it said sweetly:

Is it to wilt

That I must be broken?

I took it out
With all its roots,

Carried it to the garden
At the pretty house.

And planted it again
In a quiet place;

Now it ever spreads
And blossoms forth.

Goethe, walking with no ])urpose in niind, is attracted l>y tlie
brilliant little flower. He repoits having the same impnilse as
Tennyson: to pluck it. Ihit unlike Teimy.son, Goethe is
aware that this means killing tin; flower. I’or Goethe flu;
flower is so much alive that it .speaks and warns him; and lu;
solves the problem differently from eitlier 'Tennyson or
Ba.sho. He takes the flower Sviili till its routs’ and jdants it
again so that its life is not de.stroytai, Goetlie stands, as it
were, between Tennyson and Iktsho: foi' him, at the enicial
moment, the force of life i.s stronger flian the force of mere
intellectual cuno.sity. Needless to say that in this kteauiifui
poem Goethe expresses the core of lii.s concept of investigat¬
ing nature.

Tenny.son’s relationship) to the; flower is in the liUKle of
having, or possession - not material po.ssission Init the pos¬
session of knowledge. Balho’s ami Goelh(‘’s relatioiishi|) to
the flower each sees is in tlie mode of lieitig. By hi'iiig I refer
to the mode of existence in vvhicli one neitlmr hm imythifig
nor craves to have .something, lint is joyous, eiujiloy.s one’s
faculties productively, is oned to the wor ld.

Goethe, the great lover of life, one of the rmlsta.ndit!g
fighters against human disraemberraent and meduinisaiioji!,
has given exyrression to being as against having in many
poems. His Faust is a dramatic descrijition of the conflict
between being and having (the latter represented l)y Mt'jihi-
stopheks), while in the following short poem he e.spres.si:.s
the quality of being with the utmost simplicity:

Proi'erw

I bow that nothing belongs to me
But the thought which unimpeded
From my soul will flow.

And every favorable moment
Which Loving Fate
From the depth lets me enjoy,

The difference between being and having is not essem ialiy
that between East and West, The difference i.s rather lie-
tween a society centred around persons and one centred
around things. The having orientation is characteristic of

We.stcrn industrial society, in which greed for money, fame,
and ]}ower has become the dominant theme of life. Less
alienated societies - such as medieval society, the Zuni
Inclians, tlie African tribal societies that were not affected by
tlie ideas of modern ‘progress’ ~ have their own Bashos.
Perhaps after a few more generations of industrialisation,
the Ja])an(‘.se will have their Tennysons. It is not that West¬
ern Man cannot fully understand Eastern systems, such as
Zen Buddhism (as Jung thought), but that modern Man
cannot understand the spirit of a society that is not centred
in i)roperty and greed. Indeed, the writings of Master Eck-
hart (as difficult to understand as Basho or Zen) and the
Buddha’s writing.s are only two dialects of the same
language.

Idiomatic Changes

A certain change in the emphasis on having and being is
apparent in the growing use of nouns and the decreasing use
of verbs in Western languages in the past few centuries.

A noun is tlie propier denotation for a thing. I can say that
I have things: for instance that I have a table, a house, a
bonk, a car. 'The proper denotation for an activity, a proce.ss,
is a verb: for instance I am, I love, I desire, I hate, etc. Yet
ever more frequently an activity is expressed in terms of
having] that is, a noun is used instead of a verb. But to
cxpre.sK an activity by to have in connection with a noun is
an erroneous use of language, because processes and activi¬
ties cannot be po.sses.sed; they can only be experienced.

Older OimmivATiONS: Du M.4RAIS-Marx

The evil consequences of this confusion were already recog¬
nised in the eighteenth century. Du Marais gave a very
precise e,x})re.ssion of the problem in his posthumously pub¬
lished work Veriiahles Principes ds la Grammaire
(lyGq). He writes: ‘In this example, I have a watch> I have
must be understood in its proper sense; but in 1 have an idea,

/ have is said only by way of imitation, ft is ti hoiiowod
expression. I hm an idea im / think, I mtccim oj in
such and such a way, I have a tonkins mt'ans / desire; I have
the will means 1 want, etc.’ (my translafion; ! am mtielned
to Dr Noam Chomsky for the refereiire to Ih Marais).

A century after Du Marais observed this jilienunirnKm of
the substitution of nouns for verits Marx and Nn;‘(‘ls diail
with the same, problem, but in a mom radical fashion, in The
Holy Fflmi/y.’Included in their critiriue of bdimr Ibmei’s
‘critical critique’ is a small, but very important e.ssay on love
in which reference is made to the followiriq siaiemnnt by
Bauer: ‘Love is a cruel goddess, who like all deitie.s, wants to
possess the whole man and who i.s nut content until he lues
sacrificed to her not only his soul but also his jiliysical .self.
Her cult is suffering; the peak of this cult is self-sacrihce, is
suicide’ (ray translation).)

Marx and Engels answer; Bauer ‘transform'! love Into a
“goddess”, and into a “cruel goddes.s” by tmnsfurming the
loving man or the love of man into the man of love; hir tims
separates love as a separate being from man ;md m.ake;; it an
independent entity’ (my translation). Marx and Engels point
here to the decisive factor in the use of the noun instead of
the verb. The noun ‘love’, which is only an tibstractiun lor
the activity of loving, becomes the man of Ima*. Lovt;
becomes a goddess, an idol into which llie man {irojt'cts his
loving; in this process of alienation lie cea.s(‘.‘i to experience
love, but is in touch only witli his capacity to love by hi.s
submission to the goddess Love. He has ceased to be an
active person who feels; instead he lia.s become an alienated
worshipper of an idol,

Contemporary Usage

During the two hundred years since Du Marais, ihi.s trend of
the substitution of nouns for verbs has grown to profiurtions
that even he could hardly have imagined. Here is a typical, if
slightly exaggerated, example of today’.s language. A.ssume
that a person seeking a psychoanalyst’s help opens the com
versation with the following sentence: ‘Doctor, I have a

problem; I have insomnia. Althongh I have a beautiful
house, nice children, and a happy tmirriage, I have many
worries.' Si mu'. dei-.ndi'S ago, instead of ‘I have a problem’,
the patient proI)ably would luive said, ‘I am troubled’; in¬
stead of ‘I have insomnia’, T eannot sleep’; instead of ‘I have
a happy marriage’, ‘I am liaiiiiily mairied’.

d’he more recent speiich style indicates the prevailing high
degree of alienation. By saying ‘I have, a problem’ instead of
‘I am trouliled’, ,sul)jecl.ive ex|)erieu(',c is eliminated: the / of
ex|)erience is replaced by the it of possession. I have tran.s-
formed my feeling into something I possess: the problem.
But ‘prolrlem’ is an iil).stract (iX{)reH,sion for all kinds of
difliculties. I cannot have a prol)l('m, because it is not a thing
tliat can be owned; it, however, can have me. Tluit is to say,
I have transformed myself into ‘a problem’ and am now
owned l)y my creation. This way of .speaking betrays a
hidden, unconscious alienation.

Of coiir.se, one can argue tluit insomnia is a pliysical .symp¬
tom like a .sore throat or a toothache, and that it is therefore
as legitimate to say that one has insomnia as it is to say that
one has a .sore throat. Yet llu're is a dill'erence: a sore throat
or a toothache is a bodily .sensation that can he more or less
intense, hnt it h:is little psychical (juality. One can have a
sore throat, lor one has a throat, or an aching tooth, for one.
lias teeth. Insoimiiu, on the contraiy, is not a bodily .sen¬
sation hut a state nf mind, that of not being able to sleep. If I
speak of luiviiig insomnia’ instead of saying ‘I cannot sleep’,
1 lietray my wish to push away tlie experience of anxiety,
re.stlessMe,s.s, tension that iireveiits me from sleeping, and to
deal with the mental phenomenon as if it were a bodily
.sym})tom. ^

For another example: To .say, ‘I liave a great love for you,
is meaningless. Love is not a thing that one can have, hut a
process, an inner activity that one is the .subject oh I can
love, 1 can he in love, hut in loving, I have ... nothing. In
fact, the le.ss I luive, tlie more I can love.

: 1 .

Origin of the Terms 1

‘To have’ is a deceptively simple expression. Every human j

being has something: a body,* clotheSj shelter - on up to the ;

modern man or woman who has a car, television set, a wash- j

ing machine, etc. Living without having something is vir- |

tually impossible. Why, then, should having be a problem? j

Yet the linguistic history of ‘having’ indicates that the word |

is indeed a problem, To those who believe that to have is a ■

most natural categoiy of human existence it may come as a ;

surprise to learn that many languages have no word for ‘to
have’. In Hebrew, for instance, ‘I have’ must be expressed by i:
the indirect form jesh li (‘it is to me’). In fact, languages that
express possession in tliir way, rather than by ‘I have’, pre- |

dominate. It is interesting to note that in the development of |

many languages the construction ‘it is to me’ is followed later j

on by the construction ‘I have’, but as Emile Benveniste has i

pointed out, the evolution does not occur in the reverse di- j

rection.f This fact suggests that the word for to have de- |

velops in connection with the development of private |

property, while it is absent in societies with predominantly j

functional property, that is, possession for use. Further so-
ciolinguistic studies should be able to show if and to what
extent this hypothesis is valid.

If seems to be a relatively simple concept, or
the form ‘to be’, is all the more complicated and difficult.
‘Being’ is used in several different ways: (i) as a copula -
such as ‘I am tali’, ‘I am white’, ‘I am poor’, i.e., a grammati¬
cal denotation of identity (many languages do not have a [

word for ‘to be’ in this sense; Spanish distinguishes between ■

permanent qualities, ser, which belong to the essence of the j

subject, and contingent qualities, ertar, which are not of the |

essence); (g) as the passive, suffering form of a verb - for I

example, ‘I am beaten’ means I am the object of another’s i

* It should be mentioned here, at least in passing, that there also
exists a being relationship to oneVbody that experiences the body as
alive, and that can be expressed by saying ‘I am my body’, rather than
‘I have my body’; all practices of sensory awareness attempt this being I
experience of tlie body.

f This and the following linguistic quotations are taken from Ben¬
veniste. .

activity, not the subject of my activity, as in T beat’; (3) as
meaning to exist - wherein, as Benveniste has shown, the ‘to
be’ of existence is a different term from ‘to be’ as a copula
stating identity: ‘The two words have coexisted and can still
coexist, although they are entirely different.’

Benveniste’s study throws new light on the meaning of ‘to
l3e’ as a verb in its own right rather than as a copula. ‘To be’,
in Indo-European languages, is expressed by the root es, the
meaning of which is ‘to have existence, to be found in re¬
ality’. Existence and reality are defined as ‘that which is
authentic, consistent, true’. (In Sanskrit, sant, ‘existent’,
‘actual good’, ‘true’; superlative Sattama, ‘the best’.) ‘Being’
in its etymological root is thus more than a statement of
identity between subject and attribute; it is more than a
descriptive term for a phenomenon. It denotes the reality of
existence of who or what is; it states his/her/its authenticity
and truth, Stating that somebody or something is refers to
the person’s or the thing’s essence, not to his/her/its ap¬
pearance.

This preliminary survey of the meaning of having and
being leads to these conclusions:

1. By being or having I do not refer to certain separate
qualities of a subject as illustrated in such statements as ‘I
have a car’ or ‘I am white’ or ‘I am happy’. I refer to two
fundamental modes of existence, to two different kinds of
orientation towards self and the world, to two different kinds
of character structure the respective predominance of which
determines the totality of a person’s thinking, feeling, and
acting.

2. In the having mode of existence ray relationship to the
world is one of possessing and owning, one in which I want
to make everybody and everything, including myself, my
property.

3. In the being mode of existence, we must identify two
forms of being. One is in contrast to havings as exemplified in
the Du Marais statement, and means aliveness and authentic
relatedness to the world. The other form of being is in con¬
trast toappearinga,ndiLQkr5tQ the true nature,the true reality,
of a person or a thing in contrast to deceptive appearances
as exemplified in the etymology of being (Benveniste).

Philosophical Concepts of Being

The discussion of the concept of being is additionally
complicated because being has been the subject matter of
many thousands of philosophical books and ‘What is being?’
has been one of the crucial questions of Western philosophy.
While the concept of being will be treated here from anthro¬
pological and psychological points of view, the philosophical
discussion, is, of course, not unrelated to the anthropological
problems. Since even a brief presentation of the develop¬
ment of the concept of being in the history of philosophy
from the pre-Socratics to modern philosophy would go
beyond the given limits of this book, I shall mention only
one crucial point: the concept of process, activity, and move¬
ment as an element of being. As George Simrael has pointed
out, the idea that being implies change, i.e. that being is
becoming, has its two greatest and most uncompromising
representatives at the beginning and at the zenith of Western
philosophy: in Heraclitus and in Hegel

The position that being is a permanent, timeless, and un¬
changeable substance and the opposite of becoming, as ex¬
pressed by Parmenides, Plato, and the scholastic ‘realists’,
makes sense only on the basis of the idealistic notion that a
thought (idea) is the ultimate reality. If the idea of love (in
Plato’s sense) is more real than the experience of loving, one
can say that love as an idea is permanent and unchangeable.
But when we start out with the reality of human beings
existing, loving, hating, suffering, then there is no being that
is not at the same time becoming and changing. Living
structures can be only if they become; they can exist only if
they change. Change and growth are inherent qualities of
the life process.

Heraclitus’ and Hegel’s radical concept of life as a process
and not as a substance is paralleled in the Eastern world by
the philosophy of the Buddha. There is no room in Buddhist
thought for the concept of any enduring permanent sub¬
stance, neither things nor the self. Nothing is real but pro¬
cesses.* Contemporary scientific thought has brought about

* Z. Fifcr, one of the most outstanding, though little-known, Czech
philosophers, has related the Buddhist concept of process to authentic

34

a renaissance of the philosophical concepts of ‘process think¬
ing’ by discovering and applying them to the natural
sciences.

Having and Consuming

Before discus,sing some simple illustrations of the having and
being modes of existence, another manifestation of having
must be mentioned, that of incorporating, Incorporating a
thing, for instance by eating or drinking, is an archaic fonp
of po.sses.sing it. At a certain point in its devel()[)ment air
infant tends to take thing.s it wants into its mouth. This is the
infant’s form of taking pos.session, when its bodily develop¬
ment does not yet enable it to have other forms of con¬
trolling its possessions. We find tlie same connection between
incorporation and pfissossion in many forms of cannibalism.
For example: by eating another human being, I acquire that
person’s powers (thus canuihali.sm can be the magic equiv¬
alent of actiuiring slaves); l:)y eating the heart of a brave
man, I acquire hi.s courage; by eating a totem animal, I
acquire the divine ,sul)Htance the totem animal symboli.ses.

Of course, most objects cannot be incorporated pliysically
(and inasrmicli as tliey could, they would be lost again in the
process of elimination). But there is also symbolic and magic
incorporation. If I believe I have incorporated a god’s, a
father’s, or an animal’s image, it can neither be taken away
nor eliminated. I swallow the object symliolically and be¬
lieve in its .syral)o]ic presence within rny.scilf. This, is, for in¬
stance, how Freud exjjlaincd the superego: the intrajcicled
sum total of the father’.s proliibitions and commands. An
authority, an instiliuiem, an idea, an image can be inlro-
jected in the same way: I have them, eternally protected in
my bowels, a.s it were. (‘Iritrojectiori’ and ‘identification’ arc
often used synonymously, but it is difficult to decide whelher
they are really the .same process. At any rate, ‘identification’
.should not be used loosely, when one should better talk of
imitation or subordination.)

Marxian philosophy. Unfortunately, the work has been published only
in the Czech language and hence has been inaccessible to most Western
readers, (I know it from a private English translation,)

There are many other forms of incorporation that are not
connected with physiological needs and, hence, are not lim¬
ited. The attitude inherent in consumerism is that of swal¬
lowing the whole world. The consumer is the eternal
suckling crying for the bottle. This is obvious in pathological
phenomena, such as alcoholism and drug addiction. We ap¬
parently single out both these addictions because their
effects interfere with the addicted person’s social obligations.
Compulsive smoking is not thus censured because, while not
less of an addiction, it does not interfere with the smokers’
social functions, but possibly ‘only’ with their life spans.

Further attention is given to the many forms of everyday
consumerism later on in this volume. I might only remark
here that as far as leisure time is concerned, automobiles,
television, travel, and sex are the main objects of present-day
consumerism, and while we speak of them as leisure-time
activities, we would do better to call them leisure-time pass¬
ivities.

To sum up, to consume is one form of having, and perhaps
the most important one for today’s affluent industrial so¬
cieties. Consuming has ambiguous qualities: It relieves
anxiety, because what one has cannot be taken away; but it
also requires one to consume ever more, because previous
consumption soon loses its satisfactory character. Modern
consumers may identify themselves by the formula: 1
am = what 1 have and what 1 consume.

36

n

Having and Being in Daily Experience

Because the society we live in is devoted to acquiring
property and making a profit, we rarely see any evidence of
the being mode of existence, and most people see the having
mode as the most natural mode of existence, even the only
acceptable way of life. All of which makes it especially
difficult for people to comprehend the nature of the being
mode, ^d even to understand that having is only one pos¬
sible orientation. Nevertheless, these two concepts are rooted
in human experience. Neither one should be, or can be,
examined in an abstract, purely cerebral way; both are
reflected in our daily life and must be dealt with concretely.
The following simple examples of how having and being are
demonstrated in everyday life may help readers to under¬
stand these two alternative modes of existence.

Learning

Students in the having mode of existence will listen to a lec¬
ture, hearing the words and understanding their logical
structure and their meaning and, as best they can, will write
down every word in their looseleaf notebooks - so that, later
on, they can memorise their notes and thus pass an exam¬
ination. But the content does not become part of their own
individual system of thought, enriching and widening it. In¬
stead, they transform the words they hear into fixed clusters
of thought, or whole theories, which they store up. The stu¬
dents and the content of the lectures remain strangers to
each other, except that each student has become the owner
of a collection of statements made by somebody else (who
had either created them or taken them over from another
source).

Students in the having mode must have but one aim: to
hold on to what they ‘learned,’ either by entrusting it firmly
to their memories or by carefully guarding their notes. They

■ n ■■■ ■

do not have to produce or create something new. In fact, the
having-typt individuals feel rather disturbed by new
thoughts or ideas about a subject, because the new puts into
question the fixed sum of information they have. Indeed,
to one for whom having is the main form of relatedness to
the world, ideas that cannot easily be pinned down (or
penned down) are frightening - like everything else that
grows and changes, and thus is not controllable.

The process of learning has an entirely different quality
for students in the being mode of relatedness to the world.
To begin with, they do not go to a course of lectures, even to
the first one in a course, as tabulae rasae. They have thought
beforehand about the problems the lectures will be dealing
with and have in mind certain questions and problems of
their own. They have been occupied with the topic and it
interests them. Instead of being passive receptacles of words
and ideas, they listen, they hear, and most important, they
receive and they respond in an active, productive way. What
they listen to stimulates their own thinking processes. New
questions, new ideas, new perspectives arise in their minds.
Their listening is an alive process. They listen with interest,
hear what the lecturer says, and spontaneously come to life
in response to what they hear. They do not simply acquire
knowledge that they can take home and memorise. Each
student has been affected and has changed: each is different
after the lecture than he or she'was before it. Of course, this
mode of learning can prevail only if the lecture offers stimu¬
lating material. Empty talk cannot be responded to in the
being mode, and in such circumstanes, students in the being
mode find it best not to listen at all, but to concentrate on
their own thought processes.

At least a passing reference should be made here to the
word ‘interests,’ which in current usage has become a pallid,
worn-out expression. Yet its essential meaning is contained
in its root: Latin, inter'-esse,'to be in [or] among’ it. This

K ctive interest was expressed in Middle English by the term
0 list’ (adjective, listy; adverb, listily). In modern English,
to list’ is only used in a spatial sense: ‘ a ship lists’; the orig¬
inal meaning in a psychical sense we have only in the nega¬
tive ‘listless.’ ‘To list’ once meant ‘to be actively striving for,’

■■ '.'.qS

To be genuinely interested in.’ The root is the same as that of
Tust,’ but ‘to list’ is not a lust one is driven but the free
and active interest in, or striving for. ‘To list’js one of the
key expressions of the anonymous author (mid-fourteenth
century) of The Cloud of Unknowing (Evelyn Underhill,
ed.). That the language has retained the word only in its
negative sense is characteristic of the change of spirit in
society from the thirteenth to the twentieth century.

Remembering

Remembering can occur in either the having or the being
mode. What matters most for the difference between the two
forms of remembering is the kind of connection that is made.
In the having mode of remembering the connection is en¬
tirely mechanical, as when the connection between one word
and the next becomes firmly established by the frequency
with which it is made. Or the connections may be purely
logical, such as the connection between opposites, or be¬
tween converging concepts, or with time, space, size, colour,
or within a given ,sy.stem of thought.

In the being mode, remembering is actively recalling
words, ideas, sights, paintings, music; that is, connecting the
single datum to be remembered and the many other data
that it is connected with. The connections in the case of being
are neither mechanical nor purely logical, but alive. One
concept is connected with another by a productive act of
thinking (or feeling) that is mobilised when one searches for
the right word. A simple example: If I associate the word
‘headache’ with the word ‘aspirin,’ I form a logical, con¬
ventional association. But if I associate the word ‘headache’
with ‘stress’ or ‘anger,’ I connect the given datum with it.s
possible causes, an insight I have arrived at in studying the
phenomenon. This latter type of remembering constitutes in
itself an act of productive thinking. The most striking
examples of this kind of alive remembering are the ‘free as¬
sociations’ devised by Freud.

Persons not mainly inclined towards storing up data vvill
find that their memories, in order to function well, need a
strong and immediate interest. For example, individuals

have been known to remember words of a long-forgotten
foreign language when it has been of vital importance to do
so. And in my own experience, while I am not endowed with
a particularly good memory, I have remembered the dream
of a person I analysed, be it two weeks or five years ago, when
I again come face to face with and concentrate on the whole
personality of that person. Yet not five minutes before, in the
cold as it were, I was quite unable to remember that dream.

Remembering in the mode of being implies bringing to
life something one saw or heard before. We can experience
this productive remembering by trying to envision a person’s
face or scenery that we had once seen. We will not be able to
remember instantly in either case; we must re-create the
subject^ bring it to life in our mind. This kind of remem¬
bering is not always easy; to be able to fully recall the face or
the scenery one must have seen it with sufficient con¬
centration. When such remembering is fully achieved, the
person whose face is recalled is as alive, the remembered
scenery as vivid, as if that person or that scenery were actu¬
ally physically before one.

The way those in the having mode remember a face or
scenery is typified by the way most people look at a photo¬
graph. The photograph serves only as an aid to their
memory in identifying a person or a scene, and the usual
reaction it elicits is: ‘Yes, that’s him’; or ‘Yes, I’ve been
there.’ The photograph becomes, for most people, an alien¬
ated mmoiy.

Memory entrusted to paper is another form of alienated
remembering. By writing down what I want to remember I
am sure to have that information, and I do not try to en¬
grave it on ray brain. I am sure of my possession - except
that when I have lost my notes, I have lost ray memory of
the information, too; My capacity to remember has left me,
for my memory bank had become an externalised part of me,
in the form of my notes:

Considering the multitude of data that people in con-
temporar)' society need to remember, a certain amount of
note-making and information deposited in books is un¬
avoidable. One can easily and best observe in oneself that

40

writing down things diminishes one’s power of remem¬
bering, but some typical examples may prove helpful.

An everyday example occurs in stores. Today a sales clerk
will rarely do a simple addition of two or three items in his
or her head, but will immediately use a machine. The class¬
room provides another example. Teachers can observe that
the students who carefully write down every sentence of the
lecture will, in all likelihood, understand and remember less
than the students who trusted their capacity to understand
and, hence, remember at least the essentials. Further,
musicians know that those who most easily sight-read a score
have more difficulty in remembering the music without the
score.* (Toscanini, whose memory was known to be extra¬
ordinary, is a good example of a musician in the being
mode.) For a final example, in Mexico I have observed that
people who are illiterate or who write little have memories
far superior to the fluently literate inhabitants of the indus¬
trialised countries. Among other facts, this suggests that
literacy is by no means the blessing it is advertised to be,
'especially when people use it merely to read material that
impoverishes their capacity to experience and to imagine.

Conversing

The difference between the having and being modes can be
easily observed in two examples of conversations. Let us take
a typical conversational debate between two men in which A
Aw opinion X and B has opinion Y. Fjach identifies with his
own opinion. What matters to each is to find better, i.e. more
reasonable, arguments to defend his opinion. Neither expects
to change his own opinion, or that his opponent’s opinion
will change. Each is afraid of changing his own opinion,
precisely because it is one of his possessions, and hence its
loss would mean an impoverishment.

The situation -is somewhat different in a conversation that
is not meant to be a debate. Who has not experienced meet¬
ing a person distinguished by prominence or fame or even by
real qualities, or a person ef whom one wants something: a
good job, to be loved, to be admired? In any ‘such circum-

* This inlormation was provided by Dr Moshe Budmor.

stances many people tend to be at least mildly anxious, and
often they ‘prepare’ themselves for the important meeting.
They think of topics that might interest the other; they
think in advance how they might begin the conversation;
some even map out the whole conversation, as far as their
own part is concerned. Or they may bolster themselves up by
thinking about what they have: their past successes, their
charming personality (or their intimidating personality if
this role is more effective), their social position, their con¬
nections, their appearance and dress. In a word, they men¬
tally balance their worth, and based on this evaluation, they
display their wares in the ensuing conversation. The person
who is very good at this will indeed impress many people,
although the created impression is only partly due to the
individual’s performance and largely due to the poverty of
most people’s judgment. If the performer is not so clever,
however, the performance will appear wooden, contrived,
boring and will not elicit much interest.

In contrast are those who approach a situation by pre¬
paring nothing in advance, not bolstering themselves up in
any way. Instead, they respond spontaneously and product¬
ively; they forget about themselves, about the knowledge,
the positions they have. Their egos do not stand in their own
way, and it is precisely for this reason that they can fully
respond to the other person and that person’s ideas. They
give birth to new ideas, because they are not holding on to
anything, While the having persons rely on what they have,
the being persons rely on the fact that they are, that they are
alive and that .something new will be born if only they have
the courage to let go and to respond. They come fully alive in
the conversation, because they do not stifle. themselves by
anxious concern with what they have, Their own alivene.ss is
infectious and often helps the other person to transcend hi.s or
her egocentricity. Thus the conversation ceases to be an ex¬
change of commodities (information, knowledge, statu,s) and
becomes a dialogue in which it does not matter any more who
is right. The duellists begin to dance together, and they part
not with triumph or sorrow - which are equally sterile - but
with joy, (The essential factor in psychoanalytic therapy is
this enlivening quality of the therapist, No amount of psycho¬

42

analytic interpretation will have an effect if the therapeutic
atmosphere is heavy, unalive and boring.)

Reading

What holds true for a conversation holds equally true for
reading, which is - or should be - a conversation between
the author and the reader. Of course, in reading (as well as in
a personal conversation) whom I read from (or talk with) is
important. Reading an artless, cheap novel is a form of day¬
dreaming. It does not permit productive response; the text is
swallowed like a television .show, or the potato chips one
munches while watching TV. But a novel, say by Balzac, can
be read with inner participation, productively - that is, in
the mode of being. Yet probably most of the time it is also
read in the mode of consuming - of having. Their curiosity
having been aroused, the readers want to know the plot:
whether the hero dies or lives, whether the heroine is se¬
duced or resists; they want to know the answers. The novel
serves as a kind of foreplay to excite them; the happy or
unhappy end culminates their experience: when they know
the end, they have the whole story, almost as real as if they
rummaged in their own memories. But they have not en¬
hanced their knowledge; they have not understood the
person in the novel and thus have not deepened their insight
into human nature, or gained knowledge about themselves.

The modes of reading are the same with regard to a book
whose theme is philosophy or history. The way one reads a
philosophy or history Ixjok is formed - or better, deformed -
by education. The school aims to give each student a certain
amount of ‘cultural property’, and at the end of their school¬
ing certifies the students as having at least the minimum
amount. Students are taught to read a book so that they can
repeat the author’s main thoughts. This is how the students
‘know’ Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant,
Heidegger, Sartre. The difference between various levels of
education from high school to graduate school is mainly in
the amount of cultural property that is acquired, which cor¬
responds roughly to the amount of material property the stu¬
dents may be expected to own in later life. The so-called

43

excellent students are the ones who can most accurately
repeat what each of the various philosophers had to say.
They are like a well-informed guide at a museum. What
they do not learn is that which goes beyond this kind of
property knowledge. They do not learn to question the phil¬
osophers, to talk to them; they do not learn to be aware of
the philosophers’ own contradictions, of their leaving out
certain problems or evading issues; they do not learn to dis¬
tinguish between what was new and what the authors could
not help thinking because it was the ‘common sense’ of their
time; they do not learn to hear so that they are able to
distinguish when the authors speak only from their brain
and when their brain and heart speak together; they do not
learn to discover whether the authors are authentic or fake;
and many more things.

The mode of being readers will often come to the con¬
clusion that even a highly praised book is entirely without or
of very limited value. Or they may have fully understood a
book, sometimes better than had the author, who may have
considered everything he or she wrote as being important.

Exercising Authority

Another example of the difference between the modes of
having and being is the exercise of authority. The crucial
point is expressed in the difference between having authority
and being an authority. Almost all of us exercise authority at
least at some stage of our lives. Those who bring up children
must exercise authority - whether they want to or not - in
order to protect their children from dangers and give them
at least minimal advice on how to act in various situations.
In a patriarchal society women, too, are objects of authorityj
for most men. Most members of a bureaucratic, hierarch¬
ically organised society like ours exercise authority, except
the;.feople on the lowest social level, who are only objects of
authority.

Our understanding of authority in the two modes
depends on our recognising that ‘authority’ is a broad term
with two entirely different meanings: it can be either

44

‘rational’ or ‘irrational’ authority. Rational authority is
based on competence, and it helps the person who leans on it
to grow. Irrational authority is based on power and serves to
exploit the person subjected to it. (I have discussed this dis¬
tinction in Escape from Freedom.)

Among the most primitive societies, i.e. the hunters and
food gatherers, authority is exercised by the person who is
generally recognised as being competent for the task. What
qualities this competence rests on depends much on the
specific circumstances; generally they would include experi¬
ence, wisdom, generosity, skill, ‘presence’, courage. No per¬
manent authority exists in many of these tribes, but an
authority emerges in the case of need. Or there are different
authorities for different occasions: war, religious practice,
adjustment of quarrels. When the qualities on which the
authority rests disappear or weaken, the authority itself
ends. A very similar form of authority may be observed
among many primate societies, in which competence is often
established not by physical strength but by such qualities as
experience and ‘wisdom’. In a very ingenious experiment
with monkeys, J. M. R. Delgado (1967) had shown that if
the dominant animal even momentarily loses the qualities
that constitute its competence, its authority ends.

Being-authority is grounded not only in the individual’s
competence to fulfil certain social functions, but equally so
in the very essence of a personality that has achieved a high
degree of growth and integration. Such persons radiate
authority and do not have to give orders, threaten, bribe.
They are highly developed individuals who demonstrate by
what they are - and not mainly by what they do or say -
what human beings can be. The great Masters of Living
were such authorities, and to a lesser degree of perfection,
such individuals may be found on all educational levels and
in the most diverse cultures. (The problem of education
hinges on this point. If parents were more developed
themselves and rested in their own centre, the opposition
between authoritarian and laissez-faire education would
hardly exist. Needing this being-authority, the child reacts
to it with great eagerness; on the other hand, the child rebels

45

atsainst pressure or neglect by people who show by their om
biaviolir that they theinsclves have not nude the eHoit

‘‘'Wi* S l»d » W™"

order and much larger and more complex than those of llit
Lters and food gathered, authority by competence yields
to authority by social status. This does not nieati that the ex-
ting autoity is necessarily incompetent; it does mean tha
competence is not an essential eleinent of authority.
Whether we deal with monarchical autlioiity - wlicie tlu.
lottery of genes decides qualities of corapelence - or with an
unscrupulous criminalwho succeeds in becomnigim authority
by murder or treachery, or, as frequently in niutlern clenioc-
racy, with authorities elected on the basis o their plioto-
{renic physiognomy or the amount of money they can spend
on their election, in all these cases there may be ttlmost no

relation between competence arid authority.

But there are even serious problems in tlie citses ot auttior-
ity established on the basis of some aiinpeteuce: a leader
may have been competent in one field, iric:onipt.*tent in
another - for instance, a statesman may be com{jelenl in con¬
ducting war and incompetent in the sitmition of peace; or a
leader who is honest and courageous at the begiuniug of ins
or her career loses these qualities by tlie seduction of powtu,
or age or physical troubles may lead to a certain deter¬
ioration. Finally, one must consider that it is much easier lor
the members of a small tribe to judge the behaviour of an
authority than it is for the millions of people io our system,
who know their candidate only by the artificial image
created by public relations specialists.

Whatever the reasons for the loss of the compettmee-
forming qualities, in most larger and hierurehieally organised
societies the process of alienation of authority occurs. Tlie real
or alleged initial competence is transferred to the uniform or

to the title of the authority. If the authority weans the
proper uniform or has the proper title, external sigiuif
competence replaces the real competence and its qualitk:.s.
The king - to use this title, as a symbol for this type of
authority “ can be stupid, vicious, evil, i.e, utterly incom¬
petent to be an authority, yet he /laj’authority. As long as he

has the title, he is supposed to have the qualities of com¬
petence. Even if the emperor is naked, everybody believes he
wears beautiful clothes.

That people take uniforms and titles for the real qualities
of competence is not something that happens quite of itself.
Those who have these symbols of authority and those who
benefit therefrom must dull their subject people’s realistic,
i.e. critical, thinking and make them believe the fiction. Any¬
body who will think about it knows the machinations of
propaganda, the methods by which critical judgment is de¬
stroyed, how the mind is lulled into submission by cliches,
how people are made dumb because they become dependent
and lose their capacity to trust their eyes and judgment.
They are blinded to reality by the fiction they believe.

Having Knowledge and Knowing

The difference between the mode of having and the mode of
being in the sphere of knowing is expressed in two form¬
ulations: T have knowledge’ and ‘Tknow’. //aziing knowl¬
edge is taking and keeping possession of available knowledge
(information); knowing is functional and part of the process
of productive thinking.

Our understanding of the quality of knowing In the being
mode of existence can be enhanced by the insights of such
thinkers as the Buddha, the Hebrew prophets, Jesus, Master
Eckhart, Sigmund Freud, and Karl Marx. In their view,
knowing begins with the awareness of the deceptiveness of
our common sense perceptions, in the sense that our picture
of physical reality does not correspond to what is ‘really real’
and, mainly, in the sense that most people are half-awake,
half-dreaming, and are unaware that most of what they hold
to be true and self-evident is illusion produced by the sugges¬
tive influence of the social world in which they live. Know¬
ing then, begins with the shattering of illusions, with
rfSlksionraent {Ent4duschung). Knowing means to pen-
etrate through the surface, in order to arnve at the roo s
and hence the causes; knowing means to see re^ty m its
nakedness. Knowing does not mean to be ™

truth; it means to penetrate the surface and to strive cnti-

cally and actively m order to api.ro.oh truth evermore

*This quality of creative penetration is expressed lu the
Hebrew jadol, which means to know ;

Zowledge no particular thought ,.t 1«

Fall foverind and is disinterested and runs kiked tu ln.c,
Ltii” it touches him and grasps him’ (Hlatney, jc ad-
(‘Nakedness’ and ‘naked’ are favourite expressions of M. -i
kkhart as well as of his contemporary, the tmoiijmou
author of The Cloud of Unkniming) Accordiit!! to M-nx,
one needs to destroy illusions m order to '

ditions that make illusions unnecosstuy I'reud s con pi
self-knowledge is based on the idea of destioymig illusions
(‘ratlonalisafas’) in order to become aware of llie uiicoii-
scious reality. (The last of the En ightcimient
Freud ran be called a revolutionary thinker ui teiins ot tlu-
eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophy, not m terms
of the twentieth century.)

All these thinkers were concerned with hiiinan .satvation,

All tnese irmuwr:) Wk:n:; ...»..

they were all critical of socially accepted tliought patterns.
To them the aim of knowing is not the certainty of absirlule
truth’, something one can feel secure with, but m ielj-
affirming process oj human reason. Ignorance, for the one

ar/irmuig pfwtwj /rwovve-v ............

who knows, is as good as knowledge, smci- Itoili are jiart (it
the process of knowing, even thougli ignomnee of this kind is
different from the ignorance of the unthinking, Optimum
knowledge in the being mode is to know mure deeply. In tlie
having mode it is io have more knowledge.

Our education generally tries to train people to have
knowledge as a possession, by and large commeiisunite wuii
the amount of property or social prestige they are likely to
have ill later life. The minimum they receive is the amount

they will need in order to function properly in their work. In
addition they are each given a 'luxury-knowledge package’
to enhance their feeling of worth, the. size of each such pack¬
age being in accord with the person’s probable social prestige.
The .schools are the factories in which these overall knowl¬
edge package.s are produced - although schools usually claim
they mean to bring the students in touch with the highest
acliievements of tlie human mind. Many undergraduate
colleges are particularly adroit in nurturing these illusions.
From Indian thought and art to existentialism and sur-
rcnilism, a vast sracirgasbord of knowledge is offered from
which students pick a little here, a little there, and in the
name of .spontaneity and freedom are not urged to con¬
centrate on one .sulrject, not even to finish reading an entire
book. (Ivan Illich’s radical critique of the school system
brings many of it.s failings into focus.)

Faith

In a religious, political, or personal sense the concept of faith
can luive two entirely different meaning, depending upon
whether it is used in the having mode or in the being mode.

Faith, in the having mode, is the possession of an answer
for which one has no rational proof. It consists of form¬
ulations crtiated by others, whicli one accepts because one
Huhmits to those others - usually a bureaucracy. It carries the
feeling of certainty because of the real (or only imagined)
power of the bureaucracy. It is the entry ticket to join a
large group of ])eoplc. It relieves one of the hard task of
thinking for oneself and making decisions. One becomes oiie
of die beati possidentes, the happy owners of the right faith.
Faith, in the having mode, gives certainty; it claims to pro¬
nounce ultimate, imshakeable knowledge, which is believable
l)ecause the power of those, who promulgate and protect the
faith seems imshakeable. Indeed, who would not choose cer¬
tainty, if all it rciiuires is to surrender one s

(,Jud, originally a symbol for the highest value
exiierieiice within us, becomes, m tlie having mode, an id .
In the i)rophetic concept, an idol is a thing thnt we ourselve^
make and project our own powers into, thus impoverishing

ourselves. We then submit form.

l^asi

n tk being mode, faith is an entirely dillereiit plionom-
enL Cm welive without faith? Must not the ^

faith in its mother’s breast? Must we al not him. faith u
other beings, in those whom we love, and m oursclve. Can
we live without faith in the validity of norms fm on 1C .
Indeed, without faith we become sterile, hopeless, afraid

*Mh,'in the being mode, is not, in the first place, a belief

in certain ideas (although it may be that, too) Imt lui iimm
orientation, an attitude. It would be better to say that one
in faith than that one ha.^ faith. (The theo ogical distmc ion
between faith that is belief \fides quae ereditur] and faith ^
belief qua creditur] reflects a similar distinction b
tween the content of faith and the aet d faith. ()nc ui\ be
in faith towards oneself and towards others, and the l eligiou
person can be in faith towards God. 1 he God of the Old
Testament is, first of all, a negation of idols, of gods whom
one can have. Though conceived in analogy to an Oneutal
king, the concept of God transcends itself from the way lie-
ginning. God must not have a name; no image must be made
of God. , 1 , a ♦

Later on, in Jewish and Christian development, tlie at¬
tempt is made to achieve the complete deid()li.sation of iM,
of rather to fight the danger of idolisation by poslulatnig
that not even God’s qualities can be stated. Or most radically
in Christian mysticism - from (Pseudo) Diony.sius Ar-
eopagita to the unknown author of The Cloud oj IJnkiwwmii
and to Master Eckhart - the concept of God tends to be that

of the One, the ‘Godhead’ (the No-thing), thus joining views
expressed in the Vedas and in Neoplatonic thinking. This
faith in God is vouched for by inner experience of the divine ■
qualities in oneself; it is a continuous, active process of self-
creation - or, as Master Eckhart puts it, of Christ’s eternally
being born within ourselves.

My faith in myself, in another, in humankind, in our ca¬
pacity to become fully human also implies certainty, but cer¬
tainty based on my own experience and not on my
.submission to an authority that dictates a certain belief. It is
certainty of a truth that cannot be proven by rationally com¬
pelling evidence, yet truth I am certain of because of my ex-
periential, subjective evidence. (The Hebrew word for faith
is emimah, ‘certainty’; amen means ‘certainly’.)

If I am certain of a man’s integrity, I could not prove his
integrity up to his last day; strictly speaking, if his integrity
remains inviolate to the time of his death, even that would
not exclude a positivistic standpoint that he might have vi¬
olated it had he lived longer. My certainty rests upon the
knowledge in depth I have of the other and of my own ex¬
perience of love and integrity. This kind of knowledge is
possible only to the extent that I can drop my own ego and
see the other man in his suchness, recognise the structure of
forces in him, see him in his individuality and at the same time
in his uiiiver.sal humanity. Then I know what the other can
do, what he cannot do, and what he will not do. Of course, I
do not mean by this that I could predict all his future, be¬
haviour, but only the general lines of behaviour that are
rooted in basic character traits, such^ as integrity, re¬
sponsibility, etc. (See the chapter on Faith as a Character
Trait’ in Man for Himself.)

This faith is based on facts; hence it is rational. But the ,
facts are not recognisable or ‘provable’ by the method of i
conventional, positivistic psychology; I, the alive person, am
the only instrument that can ‘register’ them.

Loving

Loving also has two meanings,

spoken of in the mode of having or m tlie nMfcmfcftaigP

ftarfation ACC N >..-

Gan one have love? If we could, love would need to be a |
thiiiF a substance that one can have, own, possess. 1’he truth |

is there is no such thing as ‘love’. ‘Love’ is an abstraction, |

perhaps a goddess or an alien being, although noliody has |

ever seen this goddess. In reality, there exists only tlie act of j

loving. To love is a productive activity. It implies caring lor, |

knowing, responding, affirming, enjoying: the person, tlic |

tree, the painting, the idea. It means liringing to life, increa.s- |

ing his/her/its aliveness. It is a process, self-renewing and |

self-increasing. , r, . • • n i

When love is experienced in the mode of having it mipue.s |
conhning, imprisoning, or controlling the object one ‘Iovm’. |
It is strangling, deadening, .suffocating, killing, not life- ;
giving. What people call love is mostly a misuse of the word,
in order to hide the reality of their not loving, How many |

parents love their children is still an entirely open que.stion. i

Lloyd de Mause has brought out that for the past two inil- i

lennia of Western history there have been reports of cruelty
against children, ranging from physical to^ jisychic tortime,
carelessness, sheer ixrssessiveness, and sadism, so shocking i

that one must believe that loving parents are the exception j

rather than the rule. _ !

The same may be said of marriages. Whetlier tlicir mar¬
riage is based on love or, like traditional marriages of the
past, on social convenience and custom, the couple who truly ;
love each other seem to be the exception. What is social ;
convenience, custom, mutual economic interest, shared
interest in children, mutual dependency, or mutual hate or
fear is consciously experienced as ‘love’ - up to the moment
when one or both partners recognise that they do not love . ;
each other, and they never did. Today one can note .some j

progress in this respect: peojile have become more realistic ;

and sober, and many no longer feel that being sexually at- |

tracted means to love, or that a friendly, though distant,
team relationship is a manifestation of loving, This new out- i

look has made for greater honesty - as well as more frequent i

change of partnens. It has not necessarily led to a greater
frequency of loving, and the new partners may love as little
as did the old. ^ i

. The change from ‘falling in love’ to the illusion of ‘having’ I

love can often be observed in concrete detail in the history of
couples who have ‘fallen in love’. (In The Art of Loving
I pointed out that the word ‘falling’ in the phrase ‘falling in
love’ is a contradiction in itself. Since loving is a productive
activity, one can only stand in love or walk in love; one
cannot ‘fall’ in love, for falling denotes passivity.)

During courtship neither person is yet sure of the other,
but each tries to win the other. Both are alive, attractive,
interesting, even beautiful - inasmuch as aliveness always
makes a face beautiful. Neither yet has the other; hence each
one’s energy is directed to being, i.e. to giving to and stimu¬
lating the other. With, the act of marriage the situation fre¬
quently changes fundamentally. The marriage contract
gives each partner the exclusive possession of the other’s
body, feelings, and care. Nobody has to be won over any
more, because love has become something one has, a
property. The two cease to make the effort to be lovable and
to produce love, hence they become boring, and hence their
beauty disappears. They are disappointed and puzzled. Are
they not the same persons any more? Did they make a mis¬
take in the first place? Each usually seeks the cause of the
change in the other and feels defrauded. What they do not
see is that they no longer are the same people they were
when they were in love with each other; that the error that
one can have love has led them to cease loving. Now, instead
of loving each other, they settle for owning together what
they have: money, social standing, a home, children, Thus,
in .some cases, the marriage initiated on the basis of love
becomes transformed into a friendly ownership, a cor¬
poration in which the two egotisms are pooled into one: that
of the‘family’.

When a couple cannot get over the yearning for the re¬
newal of the previous feeling of loving, one or other of the
pair may have the illusion that a new partner (or partners)
will satisfy their longing. They feel that all they want to
have is love. But love to them is not an expression of their
being; it is a goddess to whom they want to submit. They
necessarily fail with their love because ‘love is a child of
liberty’ (as an old French songs says), and the worshipper of
the goddess of love eventually becomes so passive as to be

CO

boring and loses whatever is left of his or her former at-

This description is not interalcd to imply that marriage
cannot be tlie best solution tor two people who love each
other Tlie difficulty does not lie in niarnuge, hut m the
possekve, existential structure of both partners and, in the
last analysis, of their society. The advocates of such modern-
day forms of living together as group inarnagc cliangmg
partners, group sex, etc., try. as far as I can see, only to avoid
the problem of their difficulties in loving by curing boredom
with ever new stimuli and by wanting fo hme more ‘lovers
rather than to be able to love even one. (See the di.scu.ssion of
the distinction between ‘activating’ and ‘passivtiting’ stimuli
in Chapter lO of The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness.)

Ill

Having and Being in the Old and
New Testaments and in the Writings
of Master Eckhart

The Old Testament

One of the main themes of the Old Testament is: leave what
you have; free yourself from all fetters: be!

The history of Hebrew tribes begins with the command to
the first Hebrew hero, Abraham, to give up his country and
hi.s clan: ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your
father’s house to the land that I will show you’ (Genesis
12:1). Abraham is to leave what he has - land and family ■“
and go to the unknown. Yet his descendants settle on a new
soil, and new clannishness develops. This process leads to
luore severe bondage. Precisely because they become rich
and powerful in Egypt, they become slaves; they lose the
vision of the one God, the God of their nomadic ancestors,
and they worship idols, the gods of the rich turned later into
their masters.

The s(‘cond hero is Moses. Fie is charged by God to liberate
hi.s ijeople, to lead them out of the country that has become
their home (even tliough eventually a home for slaves), and
to go into the desert ‘to celebrate’. Reluctantly and with
great misgiving, the Hebrews follow their leader Moses -
into the clescrt.

Tlx: desert is the key symbol in this liberation. The desert
is no home: it has no citie.s; it has no riches; it is the place of
nomads who own what they need, and what they need are
tire necessities of life, not possessions. Fllstorically, nomadic
traditions are interwoven in the report of the Exodus, and it
may very well be that these nomadic traditions have deter¬
mined the tendency against all non-functional property and
the choice of life in the desert as preparation for the life of
freedom. But these historical factors only strengthen the
meaning of the desert as a symbol of the unfettered, non-

propertied life. Some of the main syn*ol.' <'f Af > f“-
tivak have their origin in the connection with the desert,
The unleavened bread is the bread of those wlio are in a
hurry to leave; it is tlic bread of the wandcrer.s. Ihe uiLa
('tabernacle’) is the home of the wanderer: the n|aiV!ilciit of
the tent, easily built and easily takn down. As dclined m the
Talmud it is ‘the transitory abode’, to be lived m, instead ot

the ‘fixed abode’ one owns.

The Hebrews yearn for the fleshpots of r.gypt; tor the
fixed home, for the poor yet guaranteed food; for the visible
idols. They fear the uncertainty of tlie propertyless desert
life They say: ‘Would that we had died by tlie Itaiid ol the
Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and
ate bread to the full; for you have brought us out into this
wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger’ (Exodus:
16:3). God, as in the whole story of liberation, resjionds to
the moral frailty of the people. He promises to feed tlicin: in
the morning with ‘bread’, in the evening with (luail. He adds
two important injunctions: each should gather according to
their needs: ‘And the people of Israel did so; they gathered,
some more, some less. But when they measured it with an
omer, he that gathered much had nothing over, and he that
gathered little had no lack; each gathered according to what
he could eat’ (Exodus 16:17-18).

For the first time, a principle is formulated here that
became famous through Marx: to each acctirding t() tiudr
needs. The right to be fed was established without
qualification. God is here the nouri.shing mother who fet'ds
her children, who do not have to achieve anytliing in order
to establish their right to be fed, Tiie second in jiinctiun is
one against hoarding, greed, and possessivcness. ihe iiecijile
of Israel were enjoined not to save anything till the ne.xt
morning. ‘But they did not listen to Mo.ses; .some left part of
it till the morning, and it bred worms and became foul; and
Moses was angry with them. Morning by morning they
gathered it, each as much as he could eat; but when tlie .sun
grew hot, it melted’ (Exodus 16:30-21).

In connection with the collection of food tlie concept of

the observation of the Shabbat (‘Sabbath’) is introduced.

Moses tells the Hebrews to collect twice the usual amount of

food on Friday: ‘Six days you shall gather it; but on the sev>
entli day, whidi is a Sabliath, there will be none’ (Genesis
16:26).

The Sliabbat i,s the most important of the biblical con»
cepts, and of later ^Judaism. It is tlie only strictly religious
command in the 'ren Commandments; its fulfilment is in¬
sisted uj)on liy tlie otherwise antlritualistic prophets; it was a
most .strictly oliserved commandment throughout 2,000
years of Diaspora life, wlierein its observation often was hard
and difficult. It can hardly lie doubted tliat the Shabbat was
the fountain of life for the Jews, wlio, scattered, powerless,
and often di.'sjiised and [lei'secuted, renewed their pride and
dignity when like kings they celebrated the Shabbat. Is the
Shabbat notliing but a day of rest in the mundane sense of
freeing [leople, tit least on one day, from the burden of work?
To be sure it is thtU, and (liis function gives it the dignity of
one of the great innovations in human evolution. Yet if this
were all (liat it was, tlie Shablitit would hardly liave played
the central rohi I have just described.

In order to understand this role we must penetrate to tlie
core of the Shabbat institution. It is not rest per se, in the
sense of not mtiking an eifort, physically or mentally. It is
rest in tlie sense of tiie re-establishment of complete har¬
mony between liuman being,s anti between them and nature.
Noihing must be destroyed and nothing lie built: the Shab¬
bat is a day of truce in the human fiattic with the world.
Even tearing up a lilade of grass is looked upon as a brcadi of
tills liarmony, as is lighting a match. Neither miist social
change occur. It is for this rea.son that carrying anything on
the street i.s forl,)iddeii (even if it weiglis as little as a
handkerchief), while carrying a heavy load in one’s garden is
liermitted. 'I'he point is tliat nut the effort of carrying a load
is fothidden, Imt the transfer of any olrject from one privately
owned piece of land tu another, liecause such transler con¬
stituted, originally, a tiansfer of jiroperty. On tlie Shalrbat
one lives as if one luis noihing, jmrsiiing no aim except
being, that i.s, expressing one’s essential powers: praying,
.studying, eating, drinking, singing, making love.

The Shairbat is a day of joy because on that day one is
fully oneself. Tiii.s is the reason the Talmud calls a Shabbat

the anticipation of the Mesan.c Innc, and the Mes.an.c
Time the unending Shabbat: the day on wind, proper y and
money as well as mounting and sadtms are tabu; a day on
which time is defeated and pure being rules. 1 he historical
predecessor, the Babylonian bha|)atu. was a day of .sadness
and fear. The modern Sunday is a day of fun, consumption,
and running away from oneself. One inigiit ask it ,t is not
time to re-establish the Shabbat as a innveisal day of tnu-
mony and peace, as the human day that anticipates the
human future.

The vision of the Messianic Time is the other specifica y
lewish contribution to world ciilturey and one es,ymtia ly
identical with that of the Shabbat. This vision, like the
Shabbat, was the life-siistaining hope of the Jews, never
Fiven up in spite of the severe disappointmtuits that came
with the false messiahs, from Bar Kochlia in the second cen»
tury to our days. Like the Shabliat it was a vision of a histon-
cal period in which possession will have liecomc mi'aningless,
fear and war will have ended, and tlie expression of our
essential powers will have become the aim of living,* ^

The history of the Exodus moves to a tragic end. Um
Hebrews cannot bear to live without havirm. Althougii limy
can live without a iixed abode, and without footl except diat
sent by God, every day, they cannot live without a visilile,

present ‘leader’. . , i

Thus when Moses disappears on the mountain, llie. des¬
perate Hebrews get Aaron to make them a visilde mani¬
festation of something they can worship: the Golden Cli.dl.
Here, one may say, they pay for God’s error in having per¬
mitted them to take gold and jewelleiy out of Egjpt. With
the gold, they carried within tliemselves the craving lor
wealth; and when the hour of despair came, the posse-.sivt:
structure of their existence reasserted itself. Aaion makes
them a calf from their gold, and the people say: ‘Tliese are
your Gods, 0 Israel, who brought you uj) out of the laud of
Egypt’ (Exodus 32:4).

A whole generation had died and even Moses was not:

* I have analy.sed the concept of Mcssiaiiie Time in Tm Shall Ik m
Gods. The Shabbat, too, is discussed in iluit curlier lK)i.ik, as wt;ll a;; in
the chapter on ‘The Sabbath Ritual’ in Tlw htnoUm

permitted to enter the new land. But the pew generation was
as little capable of being unfettered and of living on a land
without being bound to it as were their fathers. They
conquer new land, exterminate their enemies, settle on their
soil, and worship their idols. They transform their demo¬
cratic tribal life into that of Oriental despotism - small,
indeed, but not less eager to imitate the great powers of the
day. The revolution had failed; its only achievement was, if
it was one, that the Hebrews were now masters and not
slaves. They might not even be remembered today, except as
a learned footnote in a history of the Near East, had the new
message not found expression through revolutionary think¬
ers and visionaries who were not tainted, as was Moses, by
the burden of leadership and specifically by the need to use
dictatorial power methods (for instance the wholesale de¬
struction of the rebels under Korach).

These rcv(,)Iutionary thinkers, the Hebrew prophets, re¬
newed the vision of human freedom - of being unfettered of
things - and tlie protest against submitting to idols - the
work of tlie people’s own hands. They were uncompromising
and predicted that the people would have to be expelled
from the land again if they became incestuously fixated to it
and incaj)al)le of living in it as free people - that is, not able to
love it without losing themselves in it. To the prophets the
expulsion from the land was a tragedy, but the only way to
final liberation; tlie new desert was to last not for one but for
many generations. Even while predicting the new desert, the
prophets were sustaining the faith of the Jews, and eventu¬
ally of the whole human race, by the Messianic vision that
promised jieace and abundance without requiring the expul¬
sion or extermination of a land’s former inhabitants.

The real .suceess(,)rs to tlie Helirew prophets were the great
.scholars, the raltbis, and none more clearly so than the foun¬
der of the Diasiiora: Rabbi Jochanan ben Sakai. When the
leadens of the war against the Romans (ad 70) had decided
that it was lie iter for all to die than to be defeated and lose
their state, Rabbi Sakai committed ‘treason’. He secretly left
Jerusalem, .surre-ndered to the Roman general, and aslced
permission to found a Jewish university. This was the be¬
ginning of a rich Jewish tradition and, at the same time, or

the loss of everything the Jews had had', their state, their
temple, their priestly and military bureaucracy, their
sacrificial animals, and their rituals. All were lost and they
were left (as a group) with notliing except the ideal of being;
knowing, learning, thinking, and hoping for the Messiah.

The New Testament

The New Testament continues the Old Testament’s protest
against the having structure of existence. Its protest is even
more radical than the earlier Jewish protest had lieen. The
Old Testament was not the product of a jioor and down¬
trodden class, but sprang from nomadic sheepowners and in¬
dependent peasants. A millennium later, the Pharisees, the
learned men whose literary product was the T'almud, rep¬
resented the middle class, ranging from some very poor to
some very well-to-do member,s. Both groups were imbued
with the spirit of social justice, the protection of tlic poor,
and the assistance to all who were powerless, sucli as widow.s
and national minorities {^erim). But on tlu; wliole, they did
not condemn wealth as evil or as incompatible with tlie prin¬
ciple of being. (See Louis Finkelstein’s book on The Phar¬
isees.)

Earliest Christians, on the contrary, were mtiinly a group
of the poor and socially despised, of the downtrodden and
outcasts, who - like some of the Old Testament prophets -
castigated the rich and powerful, denouncing without
compromise wealth and secular and priestly power, as un¬
mitigated^ evils (see The Dogma of Christ). Indeed, as Max
Weber said, the Sermon on the Mount was the .speech of a
great slave rebellion. The mood of the early Christians was
one of full human solidarity, .sometimes cxpres.sed in the idea
of a spontaneous communal sharing of all material go(,)ds.
(A. F. Utz discusses the early Chri.stian communal owner¬
ship and earlier Greek examples of whom Luke probably
knew.)

This revolutionary .spirit of early Christianity appears
with special clarity in the oldest parts of the gospels as they
were known to the Christian communities that still had not
separated from Judaism, (Those oldest part.s of the go,spels

6o

can be reconstructed from the common source of Matthew
and Luke and are called ‘Q’ [() from German (liielle,
‘.source’] by .specialist.s in the hi.story of the New Testament!
The fundamental work in thi,s field is by Siegried Schulz*
who differentiates between an older attd a younper tradition
of ‘Q’.)-*'

In these sayings we find as tlie central po,stulate that people
must free themselves from all greed and craving.s for po.s-
session and must totally liberate themselves from the struc¬
ture of having, and conversely, that all positive ethical
norms arc rooted in an ethics of being, sharing, and solidarity.
I'his basic (nliical position is ap|)lied both to one’s relations
to others and to one’s relations to things. The radical re¬
nunciation of one’s own rights (Matthew 5:39-42; Luke
6:29 ^'•) well as the command to love one’s enemy (Mat¬
thew 5:44-48; Luke ():27 f., 32-36) stre.s.s, even more rad¬
ically than the Old 'festaraent’s ‘love thy neighbour’, full
concern for otlier human beings and complete surrender of
all selfishness. The norm not even to judge othens (Matthew
7:1-5; Luke 6:37 41 a further extension of the prin¬

ciple of forfeiting tme’s ego and being totally devoted to the
understanding and well-being of the other.

Also with regard to tilings, total renunciation of the
having structure i.s demanded. The oldest community in¬
sisted on the radical renunciation of property; it warns
against collecting riches: ‘Do not lay up for yourselves
treasures on earth, wliere moth and rust consume and where
thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures
in heavwi, wliem neither motli nor rust consumes and where
thieve.s do not fux'ak in and steal. For where your treasure is,
there will your lieart be also’ (Matthew 6:19-21; Luke
I2:33f,). It is in tlie .same spirit tliat Jesus .says; ‘Blessed are
you poor for yours i.s tlie kingdom of God’ (Luke 6:20; Mat¬
thew 5:3). Ind(‘ed, early Gliristianity was a community of
tlie poor and tlie sulfering, filled witli the apocalyptic con¬
viction tliat tlie time had come for tlie final di.sappearaiice of
the existing oi'dcr, according to God’s {ilan of salvation.

T’he apocalyptic concept of the ‘last Judgment’ was one

* I aw iiiticbtcil 10 Rainer Funk ffar lii.s ihorough inibrmation about
this field and lor his Ihiitful .suggestions,

61

version of the Messianic idea, current in Jewish circles of the
time. Final salvation and judgment would be preceded by a
period of chaos and destruction, a period so terrible that we
find Talmudic rabbis asking God to spare them living in the
pre-Messianic Time. What was new in Christianity was that
Jesus and his follov^'ers believed that the Time was now (or
in the near future), and chat it had already begun with Jesus’
appearance.

Indeed, one cannot help associating the situation of the
early Christians with what goes on in the world today. Not a
few people, scientists rather than religionists (with the; excep¬
tion of the Jehovah’s Witnesses), believe that we mighty be
approaching the final catastrophe of the world. Tlii.s is a
rational and scientifically tenable vision. The situation of the
early Ghrisitans was quite different. They lived in a small
part of the Roman Empire at the height of its power and
glory. There were no alarming signs of catastrophe. Yet thi.s
small group of poor Palestinian Jews carried the conviction
that this powerful world would soon collapse. Realistically,
to be sure, they were mistaken; as a result of the failure of
Jesus’ reappearance, Jesus’ death and resurrection are in¬
terpreted in the go.spels as constituting the begimiiug of the
new aeon, and after Constantine an attempt was iruide to
shift the mediating role of Jesus to the papal church. I’inally,
for all practical purposes the church became lire .substitute -
in fact, though not in tlicory - for the new aeon,

One must take early Christianity more .serioirsly than
most people do, in order to be impressed by tlie almost unbe¬
lievable radicalism of this small group of people, who spoke
the verdict over the existing world on nothing but their
moral conviction. The majority of the Jews, on the otlier
hand, not belonging e.xcluslvely to the poorest and most
downtrodden part of tlie population, cliose anotlun’ way.
They refused to believe that a new era had begun and con¬
tinued to wait for the Messiali, wlio would come when
humankind (and not only the Jews) had reached the jjohit
where the realm of justice, peace, and love could be (istab-
lished in a historical rather than in an eschatological .sense.

The younger ‘Q’ source has its origin in a further stage of
development of early Christianity. Here, too, we find the

62

same principle, and in the story of Jesus’ temptation by Satan
expre.sses it in a very succinct lorm. In this story, the lust for
having things and the craving for power and other mani¬
festations of the having structure are condemned. To the
first temptation - to transform stones into bread, sym¬
bolically expre.ssing the craving for material things ~ Jesus
answers: Man siiall not live liy bread alone, but by every
word that proceeds from the mouth of God’ (Matthew 4:4;
Luke 4:4:). Satan tempts Je,sus then with the promise of
giving him complete power over nature (changing the law of
gravity, and finally, with unrestricted power, dominion
over all kingdoms of the earth, and Jesus declines (Matthew
4.5-10, Luke 4:5-12). (Rainer Funk has called my attention
to the fact that the tein|)tatioii takes place in tlie desert, thus
taking up the topic of the Exodu.s again.)

Jesus and Safari appear here as representatives of two op¬
posite print,iple.s, Satan is the representative of material con¬
sumption and of iiower over nature and Man. Jesus is the
representative of lieing, and of the idea that not-having is
the picmise for being, I he world has followed Satan’s prin-
ciple.s, since tlie time of the go.si'iel,s. Yet even the victory of
the.se priiiciple.s could not destioy the longing for the realis-
atiun of full lieing, exjiresstid by Jesus a.s well as by many
other great Ma.sters who livixl licfore him and after him.

The ethical rigori.sra of rejection of the having orientation
for the .sake of the being orientation is to be found also in the
Jewi.sh communal orders, such us the Essenes and the order
in which the Dead Sea scrolls originated. Throughout the
history of Clirlstianity it contlmies in the religious orders
based on the vow of poverty and propertylessness.

Another manifestation of the radical concepts of early
Christianity is to be found - in various degrees - in the writ-
ing.s of the church fathers, who in this respect are also
influenced by Creek plnlf)so})hical thought 011 the subject of
private property versus coninion property. Sjiace doe.s not
permit me to discuss these teachings in any detail, and even
les.s the theological and sociological literature on the .sub¬
ject.* Although tliej'e are some differences in the degree of

* Sec the contributions of A. E, Utz, 0 . Sclulling, H, Schumacher, and
others.

6q

radicalism and a certain trend to a less radical view the more
the church became a powerful institution, it is undeniable ,
that the early church thinkers shared a sharp condemnation
of luxury and avarice and a contempt for wealth.

Justin writes, in the middle of the second century; ‘We
who once loved riches [mobile goods] and possession [land]
above everything else, now make that which we already
have into common property and share it with the needy.’ In
a ‘Letter of Diognetus’ (also second century), there is a very
interesting passage that reminds us of Old Testament
thought about homelessness: ‘Any alien country is their [the
Christians’] fatherland and every fatherland is alien to
them.’ Tertullian (third century) considered all trade to be
the result of cupidity, and he denies its necessity among
people who are free from greed, He declares that trade
always carries with it the danger of idolatry. Avarice he calls
the root of all evil.*

For Basilius, as for the other church fathers, the purpose
of all material goods is to serve people; characteristic of him
is this question: ‘The one who takes away a garment from
another is called a thief; but the one who does not clothe the
poor, although he could - does he deserve another name?’
(quoted by Utz). Basilius stressed the original community of
goods and was understood by some authors to have represen¬
ted communist tendencies, I conclude this brief sketch with
Ghrysostomus’ warning (fourth century) that superfluous
goods must not be produced or consumed. He says: ‘Do not
say Fuse what is mine: you use what is alien to you; the
indulgent, selfish use makes what is yours something alien;
that is why I call it alien good, because you use it with a
hardened heart and claim that it is right, that you alone live
from what is yours.’

1 could go on for many pages quoting the views of the
church fathers that private property and the egotistical use
of any possession is immoral. Yet even the foregoing few
statements indicate the continuity of the rejection of the
having orientation as we find it from Old Testament times,
throughout early Christianity, and into the later centuries.

* The above passages are taken from Otto Sehilling; see also his
quotations from K. Farner and T. Somraerlad.

Even Aquinas, battling against the openly communist sects,
concludes that the institution of private property is justified
only inasmuch as it best serves the purposes of satisfying the
welfare of all.

Classic Buddhism emphasises even more strongly than the
Old and New Testaments the central importance of giving
up craving for possessions of any kind, including one’s own
ego, the concept of a lasting substance, and even the craving
for one’s perfection.*

Master Eckhart (rsSo-c, i^sfj

Eckhart has described and analysed the difference between
the having and being modes of existence with a penetration
and clarity not surpassed by any teacher. A major figure of
the Dominican Order in Germany, Eckhart was a scholarly
theologian and the greatest representative and deepest and
most radical thinker of German mysticism. His greatest
influence radiated from his German sermons, which affected
not only his contemporaries and disciples but also German
mystics after him and, today, those seeking authentic guid¬
ance to a non-theistic, rational, yet religious, philosophy of
life.

My sources for the Eckhart quotations that follow are
Joseph L. Quint’s great Eckhart work Meister Eckhart, Die
Deutschen Werke (referred to here as ‘Quint D.W.’), his
Meister Eckhart, Deutsche Predigten und Traktate (referred
to as ‘Quint D.P.T.’), and the English translation by Ray¬
mond B. Blakney, Meister Eckhart (referred to here as ‘Blak-
ney’). It should be noted that while Quint’s editions contain
only the passages he considers have been proven authentic so
far, the Blakney text (translated from the German, Pfeiffer,
edition) includes writings whose authenticity Quint has not
yet acknowledged. Quint himself has pointed out, however,
that his recognition of authenticity is provisional, that very
likely many of the other works that have been attributed to
Master Eckhart will also be proven authentic. The italicised

* For a penetrating understanding of Buddhism, see the writings of
Nyanaponika Mahatera, particularly The Heart of Buddhist Meditation
aadPathwa^sof Buddhist Thouiht: Essays from the Meel.

numbers that appear with the source of notes refer to the
Eckhart sermons as they are identified in the three sources.

Eckhart’s Concept of Having

The classic source for Eckhart’s views on the mode of having
is his sermon on poverty, based on the text of Matthew
5:12: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom
of heaven.Mn this sermon Eckhart discusses the question;
What is spiritual poverty? He begins by saying that he does
not speak of external poverty, a poverty of things, although
that kind of poverty is good and commendable. He wants to
speak of inner poverty, the poverty referred to in the gospel
verse, which he defines by saying; ‘He is a poor man who
wants mthmg, Anotur nothing and has nothing’ (Blakney,
28 ; Quint D. W., 52 ; Quint D.P.T., 51?).

Who is the person who luants nothing? A man or woman
who has chosen an ascetic life would be our common re¬
sponse. But this is not Eckhart’s meaning, and he scolds those
who understand not wanting anything as an exercise of re-

t .. pentance and an external religious practice. He sees the sub¬

scribers to that concept as people who hold on to their selfish
egos. ‘These people have the name of being saintly on the
basis of the external appearances, but inside they are asses,
because they don’t grasp the true meaning of divine truth’
(my translation of Quint’s text).

For Eckhart is concerned with the kind of ‘wanting’ that is
also fundamental in Buddhist thought; that is, greed, crav¬
ing for things and for one’s own ego. The Buddha considers
this wanting (= attachment, craving) to be the cause of
human suffering, not of enjoyment. When Eckhart goes on
to speak of having no will he does not mean that one should
be weak. The will he speaks of is identical with craving, a
will that one is driven by - that is, in a true sense, not will.
Eckhart goes as far as to postulate that one should not even
want to do God’s will - since this, too, is a form of craving.
The person who wants nothing is the person who is not
greedy for anything: this is the essence of Eckhart’s concept
of non-attachment.

Who is the person who knows nothing? Does Eckhart es¬
tablish that it is one who is an ignorant dumb being, an uned^
ucated, uncultured creature? How could he, when his main
effort was to educate the uneducated and when he himself
was a man of great erudition and knowledge that he never
attempts to hide or minimise?

Eckhart’s concept of not knowing anything is concerned
with the difference between having knowledge and the act of
knowing, i.e. penetrating to the roots and, hence, to the
causes of a thing. Eckhart distinguishes very clearly between
a particular thought and the process of thinking. Stressing
that it is better to know God than to love God, he writes:
‘Love has to do with desire and purpose, whereas knowledge
is no particular thought, but rather it peels off all [coverings]
and is disinterested and runs naked to God, until it touches
him and grasps him’ (Blakney, Fragment 27; not auth¬
enticated by Quint)

But on another level (and Eckhart speaks throughout on
several levels) Eckhart goes much further, He writes:

Again, he is poor who knows nothing. We have sometimes said
that man ought to live as if he did not live, neither for self, nor
for the truth, nor for God, But to that point, we shall say some¬
thing else and go further. The man who is to achieve this poverty
shall live as a man who does not even know that he lives, neither
for himself, nor for the truth, nor for god. More; he shall be quit
and empty of all knowledge, so that no knowledge of god exists
in him; for when a man’s existence is of God’s external species,
there is no other life in him; his life is himself. Therefore we say
that a man ought to be empty of his own knowledge, as he was
when he did not exist, and let God achieve what he will and man
be unfettered (Blakney, 28; Quint D.W., 52; Quint D.P.T., 32; a
small portion is my translation of Quint’s German text).*

To understand Eckhart’s position, it is necessary to grasp
the true meaning of these words. When he .says that ‘a man
ought to be empty of his own knowledge’, he does not mean

* Blakney uses a capital ‘G’ for God when Eckhart refers to the God¬
head and a lower-case ‘g’ when Eckhart refers to the biblical god of
creation.

67

that one should forget what one knows, but rather one
should forget that one knows. This is to say that we should
not look at our knowledge as a possession, in which we find
security and which gives us a sense of identity; we sliould not
be ‘filled’ with our knowledge, or hang on to it, or crave it.
Knowledge should not assume the quality of a dogma, which
enslaves us. All this belongs to the mode of having. In the
mode of being, knowledge is nothing but the penetrating
activity of thought - without ever becoming an invitation to
stand still in order to find certainty. Eckhart continues:

What does it mean that a man should have nothing?

Now pay earnest attention to this: I have often said, and great
authorities agree, that to be a proper abode for God and fit for
God to act in, a man should also be free from all [his own] thing.?
and [his own] actions, both inwardly and outwardly. Now we
shall say something else. If it is the case that a man is emptied of
things, creatures, himself and god, and if still God could find a
place in him to act, then we say: As long as that [place] exists,
this man is not poor with the most intimate poverty. For God
does not intend that man shall have a place reserved for God to
work in, since true poverty of spirit requires that man shall be
emptied of God, and all his worb, so that if God wants to act in
the soul, he himself must be the place in which he acts - and that
he would like to do.... Thus we say that a man should be so
poor that he is not and has not a place for God to act in, To
reserve a place would be to maintain distinctions. 'Therefore I
pray God that he may quit me oj God^ (Blakney^ pp. 230-231).

Eckhart could not have expressed his concept of not
having more radically. First of all, we should be free from
our own things and our own actions. This does not mean
that we should neither possess anything nor do anything; it
means we should not be bound, tied, chained to what we
own and what we have, not even to God.

Eckhart approaches the problem,? of having on another
level when he discusses the relation between po.s,session and
freedom, Human freedom is restricted to the extent to which
we are bound to possession, works, and lastly, to our own
egoSi By being bound to our egos (Quint translates the orig¬
inal middle-German Eigemchajt Ich-bindiing or Ich-

68

suck, ‘egoboundness’ or ‘egomania’), we stand in our own
way and are blocked from bearing fruit, from realising our-
.selves fully (Quint D.P.T., Introduction, p. 29). D. Mieth, in
my opinion, is entirely right when he maintains that free¬
dom as a condition of true productivity is nothing but giving
up one’s ego, as love in the Paulinian sense is free from all
egoboundness. Freedom in the sense of being unfettered, free
from the craving for holding on to things and one’s ego, is
the condition for love and for productive being. Our human
aim, according to Eckhart, is to get rid of the fetters of ego¬
boundness, egocentricity, that is to say the having mode of
existence, in order to arrive at full being. I have not found
any author whose thoughts about the nature of the having
orientation in Eckhart are as similar to my own thinking as
those expressed by Mieth (1971). He speaks of the Be-
sitzstruktur des Menschen (‘the property structure of the
people’) in the same way, as far as I can see, that I speak of
the ‘having mode’, or the ‘having structure of existence’. He
refers to the Marxian concept of ‘expropriation’, when he
speaks of the breakthrough of one’s own inner property
structure, adding that it is the most radical form of ex¬
propriation.

In the having mode of existence what matters is not the
various objects of having, but our whole attitude. Every¬
thing and anything can become an object of craving: things
we use in daily life, property, rituals, good deeds, knowledge,
and thoughts. While they are not in themselves ‘bad’, they
become bad; that is, when we hold on to them, when they
become chains that interfere with our freedom, they block
our self-realisation.

Eckhart’s Concept of Being

Eckhart uses being in two different, though related, mean¬
ings. In a narrower p.sychological sense, being/denotes the
real and often unconscious motivations that impel human
beings, in contrast to deeds and opinions as such and sep¬
arated from the acting and thinking person. Quint justly
calls Eckhart an extraordinary analyst of the soul [genialer

Seelenandytiker): ‘Eckhart never tires of uncovering the
most secret ties of human behaviour, the most hidden stir¬
ring of selfishness, or intentions and opinions, of denouncing
the passionate longing for gratitude and rewards’ (Quint
D.P.T., Introduction, p. 29; my translation). This insight
into the hidden motives makes Eckhart most appealing to
the post-Freudian reader, who has overcome the naivete of
pre-Freudian and still current behaviouristic views, which
claim that behaviour and opinion are two final data that can
be as little broken down as the atom was supposed to be at
the beginning of this century. Eckhart expressed this view in
numerous statements, of which the following is charac¬
teristic: ‘People should not consider so much what they are
to do as what they are.,., I'hus take care that your em¬
phasis is laid on being good and not on the number or kind of
things to be done. Emphasise rather the fundamentals on
which your work rests.’ Our being is the reality, the spirit
that moves us, the character that impels our behaviour; in
contrast, the deeds of opinions that are separated from our
dynamic core have no reality.

The second meaning is wider and more fundamental;
being is life, activity, birth, renewal, outpouring, flowing out,
productivity. In this sense, being is the opposite of having, of
egoboundness and egotism. Being, to Eckhart, means to be
active in the classic sense of the productive expression of
one’s human powers, not in the modern sense of being busy.
Activity to him means ‘to go out of oneself (Quint D.P.T.,
6 ; my translation), which he expresses in many word pic¬
tures: he calls being a process of ‘boiling’, of ‘giving birth’,
something that ‘flows and flows in itself and beyond itself
(E. Benz et al, quoted in Quint D.P.T., p, 35; my trans¬
lation). Sometimes he uses the symbol of running in order to
indicate the active character; ‘Run into peace! The man
who is in the state of running, of continuous running into
peace is a heavenly man. He continually runs and moves and
seeks peace in running’ (Quint D.P.T., 8 ; my translation).
Another definition of activity is: The active, alive man is like
a ‘vessel that grows as it is filled and will never be full’ (Blak-
ney, p. 233; not authenticated by Quint).

Breaking through the mode of having is the condition for

70

all genuine activity. In Eckhart’s ethical system the supreme
virtue is the state of productive inner activity, for which the
premise is the overcoming of all forms of egoboundness and
craving.

IV

What Is the Having Mode?

The Acquisitive Society-Basis for the Having Mode

Our judgments are extremely biased because we live in a ;

society that rests on private property, profit, and power as '

the pillars of its existence. To acquire, to own, and to make a
profit are the sacred and unalienable rights of the individual '
in the industrial society.* What the sources of property are :
does not matter j nor does possession impose any obligations
on the property owners. The principle is: ‘Where and how i

my property was acquired or what I do with it is nobody’s ^

tmsiness but ray own; as long as I do not violate the law, my j

right is unrestricted and absolute.’ !

This kind of property may be called private property
(from Latin privare, ‘to deprive of’), because the person or *
persons who own it are its sole masters, with full power to
deprive others of its use or enjoyment. While private owner¬
ship is suppo.sed to be a natural and universal category, it is
in fact an exception rather than the rule if we consider the
whole of human history (including prehistory), and par¬
ticularly the Cultures outside Europe in which economy was
not life’s main concern. Aside from private property, there
are: self-created property, which is exclusively the result of
one’s own work; restricted property, which is restricted by
the obligation to help one’s fdhw htlngs; functional, or ,1
personal, property, which consists either of tools for work or |
of objects for enjoyment; common property, which a group
.shares in the spirit of a common bond, such as the Israeli '
kibbutzim.

The norms by which .society functions also mould the
character of its members (‘social character’), In an industrial

* R. H. Tawnpy’s 1920 work, The Acquisitive Society, is still unsurpassed
in its understanding of modern capitalism and options for social and s;
human change. The contributions by Max Weber, Brentano, Schapiro, e

Pascal, Sombart, and Kraus contain fundamental insights lor under- ;

.standing industrial society’s influence on human beings,

T.'-. '■ 75 !

society these are: the wish to acquire property, to keep it, i
and to increase it, i.e. to make a profit, and those who own
property are admired and envied as superior beings. But the !
vast majority of people own no property in a real sense of r
capital and capital goods, and the puzzling question arises: |

How can such people fulfil or even cope with their passion i
for acquiring and keeping property, or how can they feel like I.
owners of property when they haven’t any property to speak
of? I

Of course, the obvious answer is that even people who are ;
property poor own something - and they cherish their Ijttle 1
possessions as much as the owners of capital cherish their
property. And like the big property owners, the poor are
obsessed by the wish to preserve what they do have and to
increase it, even though by an infinitesimal amount (for in- j
stance by saving a penny here, two cents there). '

Furthermore, the greatest enjoyment is perhaps not so f
much in owning material things but in owning living beings. ;
In a patriarchal society even the most miserable of men in
the poorest of classes can be an owner of property - in his i
relationship to his wife, his children, his animals, over whom i
he can feel he is absolute master. At least for the man in a I
patriarchal society, having many children is the only way to I
own persons without needing to work to attain ownership, i
and with little capital investment. Considering that the j

whole burden of childbearing is the woman’s, it can hardly :

be denied that the production of children in a patriarchal t

society is a matter of crude exploitation of women. In turn,
however, the mothers have their own form of ownership,
that of the children when they are small. The circle is ;

endless and vicious: the husband exploits the wife, she ex- '

ploits the small children, and the adolescent males soon join 1

the elder men in exploiting the women, and so on. ;

The male hegemony in a patriarchal order has lasted :

roughly six or seven millennia and still prevails in the poor- f

est countries and among the poorest classes of society. It is, I

however, slowly diminishing in the more affluent societies ■ |

emancipation of women, children, and adole.scents seems to |

take place when and to the degree that a society’s standard
of living rises, With the slow collapse of the old-fashioned, ^

' ' :t:

patriarchal type of ownership of persons, in what will the '
average citizens of the fully developed industrial societies i
now find fulfilment of their passion for acquiring, keeping, i
and increasing property? The answer lies in extending the I
area of ownership to include friends, lovers, health, travel,;
art objects, God, one’s own ego. A brilliant picture of the ^
bourgeois obsession with property is given by Max Stirner. i
Persons are transformed into things; their relations to each ;
other assume the character of ownership. Tndividualism’,"
which in its positive sense means liberation from social:
chains, means, in the negative sense, ‘self-ownership’, the i
right “ and the duty - to invest one’s energy in the success of |
one’s own person.

Our ego is the most important object of our property feel- :
ing, for it comprises many things: our body, our name, our ;
social status, our possessions (including our knowledge), the
image we have of ourselves and the image we want others to
have of us. Our ego is a mixture of real qualities such as :
knowledge and skills, and of certain fictitious qualities that we ;
build around a core of reality, But the essential point is not ;
so much what the ego’s content is, but that the ego is felt as a ■
thing we each possess, and that this ‘thing’ is the basis of our i
sense of identity.

This discussion of property must.take into account that an i
important form of property attachment that flourished in ;
the nineteenth century has been diminishing in the decades :
since the end of the Irirst World War and is little evident ^
today. In the older period, everything one owned was cher- i
ished, taken care of, and used to the very limits of its utility. |
Buying was ‘kecp-it’ buying, and a motto for the nineteenth !
century might well have been: ‘Old is beautiful!’ Today, ;
consumption is emphasised, not preservation, and buying ;
has become ‘throw-away’ buying. Whether the object one '
buy.s is a car, a dress, a gadget, after using it for some time, ;
one gets tired of it and is eager to dispo.se of the ‘old’ and buy ‘
the latest model. Acquisition ~> transitory having and |
using ^ throwing away (or if possible, profitable exchange !
for a better model) new acquisition, constitutes the vicious |
circle of consumer-buying and today’s motto could indeed |
be:‘New is beautiful!’ <

77

Perhaps the most striking example of today’s consumer-
buying phenomenon is the private autoraol,)ile. Our age de¬
serves to be dubbed ‘the age of the autornol:)ile’, for our
whole economy has been built around automobile product¬
ion, and our whole life is greatly determined by tin; rise and
fall of the consumer market for cars.

To those who have one, their car seems like a vital necess¬
ity; to those who do not yet own one, especially peoi)le in the
so-called socialist states, a car is a symbol of happiness. Ap¬
parently, however, affection for one’s car is not deep and
abiding, but a love affair of somewhat short duration, for
owners change their cars frequently; after two years, even
after just one, an auto owner tires of the ‘old car’ and starts
shopping around for a ‘good deal’ on a new vehicle. From
shopping around to purchase, the whole transaction seems to
be a game in which even trickeiy is sometimes a |:)rime ele¬
ment, and the ‘good deal’ is enjoyed as much as, if not more
than, the ultimate prize: that brand-new model in the drive¬
way.

Several factors must be taken into account in order to
solve the puzzle of the seemingly flagrant contradiction be¬
tween the owners’ property relationship to their automoltiles
and their so-short-lived interest in them. First, there is the
element of depersonalisation in llie owner’s relationsliif) to
the car; the car is not a concrete object that its owner is fond
of, but a status symbol, an extension of power - an ego
builder; having acquired a car, the owner has actually ac¬
quired a new piece of ego. A second factor is that Imying a
new car every two years instead of, say, evei'y six increasits
the buyer’s thrill of acquisition; the act of making tlie new
car one’s own is a kind of defloration - it enhances one’s
sense of control, and the more often it luijtpens, the mon;
thrilled one is. The third factor is,that frequent car Iruying
means frequent opportunities to ‘make a deal' - to make a
profit by the exchange - a satisfaction deejjly rooted in men
and women today. The fourth factor is one of great inijtort-
ance: the need to experience new stimuli, because the okl
stimuli are flatand exhausted after but a sliort wliile. In an
earlier discussion of stimuli {'J'he Anatomy 0/ Human De¬
structiveness), I differentiated between ‘activating’ and

‘passivating’ stimuli and suggested the following form¬
ulation: ‘The more “passivating” a stimulus is, the more
frequently it must he changed in intensity and/or in kind;
the more “activating” it is, the longer it retains its stimulating
quality and the less necessary is change in intensity and con¬
tent.’ The fifth and most important factor lies in the change
in social character that has occurred during the last hundred
years, i.e. from the ‘hoarding’ to the ‘marketing’ character.
While the change does not do away with the having orient¬
ation, it docs modify it considerably. (This development
from the hoarding to the marketing character is discu.ssed in
Chapter VII.)

The pro|,)rietary feeling also shows up in other relation¬
ships, for exam[)le towards doctors, dentists, lawyers, bo.sses,
workers. People express it in .speaking of ‘my doctor’, ‘my
denti.st’, ‘my workers’, and so on. But aside from their
pro{)etty attitude towards other human being.s, people ex¬
perience an unending number of objects, even feelings, as
proj)erty. Take hcaltli and illness, for example. People who
discuss their lieallii do so with a proprietary feeling, refer-
I'ing t(.) their sicknes.se.s, their o}')eration.s, their treatments -
their diets, their medicines. They clearly consider that health
and sickness are |)ru])erty; their property relationship to
their Irad health is analogous, say, to that of a stockholder
whose .sharers tire losing part of their original value in a badly
fulling market.

Ith'us and Irelicfs can also Irecome property, as can even
hal)its. For instance, anyone who eats an identical breakfast
at the s.-irne time each rnoniing can l.)e disturbed by even a
sliglu change in th.at routine, because his habit has become a
pn)|:)(nly whose loss eii(lanf,ter.s his .security,

'Pile picture of ilie universality of the having mode of
existence nitiy strike many readers as too negative and one¬
sided ; and indeed it is. I unuted to jiortray the .socially preva¬
lent attitude fir,si in order to give as dear a picture as pos¬
sible. But there is another element that can give this picture
a degree of b.'ilaiiei', ;uid lluit is a growing attitude among
the young geneisition ill,at is quite different from the ma¬
jority, Among these young |)eo|:)le we find jiattenis of con-
.simipliou tliat are not liidden forms of acquisition and

having, but expressions of genuine joy in doing what one
likes to do without expecting anything ‘lasting’ in return.
These young people travel long distances, often with hard*
ships, to hear music they like, to see a place they want to see,
to meet people they want to meet. Whether their aims are as
valuable as they think they are is not the question here; even
if they are without sufficient seriousness, preparation, or con¬
centration, these young people dare to be, and they are not
interested in what they get in return or what they can keep.
They also seem much more sincere than the older gener¬
ation, although often philosophically and politically naive.
They do not polish their egos all the time in order to be a
desirable ‘object’ on the market. They do not protect their
image by constantly lying, with or without knowing it; they
do not expend their energy in repressing truth, as the
majority does. And frequently, they impress their elders by
their honesty - for their elders secretly admire people who
can see and tell the truth. Among them are politically and
religiously oriented groups of all shadings, but also many
without any particular ideology or doctrine who may say of
themselves that they are just ‘searching’. While they may not
have found themselves, or a goal that gives guidance to the
practice of life, they are searching to be themselves instead
of having and consuming.

This positive element in the picture needs to be qualified,
however. Many of these same young people (and their
number has been markedly decreasing since the late sixties)
had not progressed from the freedom from to freedom to;
they simply rebelled without attempting to find a goal
towards which to move, except that of freedom from restric¬
tions and dependence. Like that of their bourgeois parents,
their motto was ‘New is beautiful!’ and they developed an
almost phobic disinterest in all tradition, including the
thoughts that the greatest minds have produced. In a kind of
naive narcissism they believed that they could discover by
themselves all that is worth discovering. Basically, their ideal
was to become small children again, and such authors as
Marcuse produced the convenient ideology that return to
childhood - not development to maturity - is the ultimate
goal of socialism and revolution. They were happy as long as

8o

they were young enough for this euphoria to last; but many
of them have passed this period with severe disappointment,
without having acquired well-founded convictions, without
a centre within themselves. They often end up as disap¬
pointed, apathetic persons - or as unhappy fanatics of de¬
struction.

^ Not all who had started with great hopes ended up with
disappointment, however, but it is unfortunately impossible
to know what their number is. To my knowledge no valid
statistical data or sound estimates are available, and even if
they were available, it is almost impossible to be sure how to
qualify the individuals. Today, millions of people m Am¬
erica and Europe try to find contact with tradition and with
teachers who can show them the way, But in large part the
doctrines and teachers are either fraudulent, or vitiated by
the spirit of public relations ballyhoo, or mixed up with the
financial and prestige interests of the respective gurus. Some
people may genuinely benefit from such methods in spite of
the sham; others will apply them without any serious inten¬
tion of inner change. But only a detailed quantitative and
qualitative analysis of the new believers could show how
many belong to each group.

My personal estimate is that the young people (and some
older ones) who are seriously concerned with changing from
the having to the being mode number more than a few dis¬
persed individuals. I believe that quite a large number of
groups and individuals are moving in the direction of being,
that they represent a new trend transcending the having
orientation of the majority, and that they are of historical
significance. It will not be the first time in history that a
minority indicates the course that historical development
will take, The existence of this minority gives hope for the
general change in attitude from having to being. This hope
is all the more real since some of the factors that made it
possible for these new attitudes to emerge are historical
changes that can hardly be reversed: the breakdown of
patriarchal supremacy over women and of parents’ domi¬
nation of the young. While the political revolution of the
twentieth century, the Russian revolution, has failed (it is
too early to judge the final outcome of the Chinese rev-

81

olution), the victorious revolutions of our century, even
though they are only in their first stages, are the women’s,
the children’s, and the sexual revolutions. Their principles
have already been accepted by the consciousness of a great
many individuals, and every day the old ideologies become
more ridiculous.

The Nature of Having

The nature of the having mode of existence follows from the
nature of private property. In this mode of existence all that
matters is my acquisition of property and ray unlimited right
to keep what I have acquired. The having mode excludes
others; it does not require any further effort on my part to
keep my property or to make productive use of it. The
Buddha has described this mode of behaviour as craving, the
Jewish and Christian religions as coveting; it transforms
everybody and everything into something dead and subject to
another’s power.

The sentence T have something’ expresses the relation be¬
tween the subject, I (or he, we, you, they), and the object, 0 .
It implies that the subject is permanent and the object is
permanent. But is there permanence in the subject? Or in
the object? I shall die; I may lose the social position that
guarantees my having something. The object is similarly not
'^permanent: it can be destroyed, or it can be lost, or it can
lose its value. Speaking of having something permanently
rests upon the illusion of a permanent and indestructible
substance. If I seem to have everything, I have - in reality -
nothing, since my having, possessing, controlling an object is
only a transitory moment in the process of living.

In the last analysis, the statement ‘I [subject] have 0
[object]’ expresses a definition oil through my possession of
0 . The subject is not myself but / am what 1 have. My
property constitutes myself and my identity. The underlying
thought in the statement ‘I am I’ is T am I because I have X’
- X equalling all natural objects and persons to whom I
relate myself through ray power to control them, to make
, them permanently mine.

In the having mode, there is no alive relationship between
82

me and what I have. It and I have become things, and I
have It, because I have the force to make it mine. But there is
also a reverse relationship: it has me, because my sense of
idmtity, i,e. o sanUy, rests upon my having it (and as many
tfiings as possible). The having mode of existence is not estab-
lished by an alive, productive process between subject and
object; it makes things of both object and subject. The re¬
lationship IS one of deadness, not aliveness.

Having - Force - Rebellion

The tendency to grow in terms of their own nature is com¬
mon to all living beings. Hence we resist any attempt to
prevent our growing in the ways determined by our struc¬
ture. In order to break this resistance, whether it is conscious
or not, physical or mental force is necessary. Inanimate
objects resist control of their physical composition in various
degrees through the energy inherent in their atomic and
molecular structures. But they do not fight against being
used. The use of heteronomous force with living beings (i.e.
the force that tends to bend us in directions contrary to our
given structure and that is detrimental to our growth)
arouses resistance. This resistance can take all form.s,
ineffectual, and, very often, unconscious resistance.

What is restricted is the free, spontaneous expression of'^’
the infant’s the child’s, the adolescent’s, and eventually the
adult’s will, their thirst for knowledge and truth, their wish
for affection. The growing person is forced to give up most
of his or her autonomous, genuine desires and interests, and
his or her own will, and to adopt a will and desires and
feelings that are not autonomous but superimposed by the
social patterns of thought and feeling. Society, and the
family as its pyschosocial agent, has to solve a difficult prob¬
lem: How to break a.person's will without his being aware of
it? Yet by a complicated proce.ss of indoctrination, rewards,
puni.shment.s, and fitting ideology, it solves this task by and
large so well that most people believe they are following
their own will and are unaware that their will itself is con¬
ditioned and manipulated.

%

The greatest difficulty in this suppression of the will exists
with regard to sexuality, because we deal here with a strong
tendency of the natural order that is less easy to manipulate
than many other desires. For this reason society tries harder
to fight sexual desires than almost any other human desire.
No need to cite the various forms of the vilification of sex
from moral grounds (its evilness) to health grounds (mas¬
turbation does physical harm). The church forbids birth
control, not really because of her concern for the sacredness
of life (a concern which would lead to the condemnation of
the death penalty and of war), but in order to denigrate sex
unless it serves procreation.

The effort made to suppress sex would be difficult to
understand if it were for the sake of sex as such. Not sex,
however, but the breaking of human will is the reason for
vilifying sex. A great number of the so-called primitive so¬
cieties have no sex taboo whatever. Since they function with¬
out exploitation and domination, they do not have to break
the individual’s will. They can afford not to stigmatise sex
and to enjoy the pleasure of sexual relations without guilt
feelings. Most remarkable in these societies is that this sexual
freedom does not lead to sexual greed; that after a period of
relatively transient sexual relations couples find each other;
that they then have no desire to swap partners, but are also
free to separate when love has gone. For these not-property-
oriented groups sexual enjoyment is an expression of being,
not the result of sexual possessiveness. In saying this I do not
imply that we should return to living as these primitive so¬
cieties do “ not that we could, even if we wanted to, for the
simple reason that the process of individuation and indi¬
vidual differentation and distance that civilisation has
brought about gives individual love a different quality from
that in primitive society. We cannot regress; we can only
move forward. What matters is that new forms of property-
lessness will do away with the sexual greed that is charac¬
teristic of all having societies.

Sexual desire is one expression of independence that is
expressed very early in life (masturbation). Its denunciation
serves to break the will of the child and make it feel guilty,
and thus more submissive. To a large extent the impulse to

break sexual taboos is essentially an attempt at rebellion
aimed at restoring one’s freedom. But the breaking of sexual
taboos as such does not lead to greater freedom; the re¬
bellion is drowned, as it were, in the sexual satisfaction...
and in the person’s subsequent guilt feelings. Only the
achievement of inner independence is conducive to freedom
and ends the need for fruitless rebellion. The same holds true
for all other behaviour that aims at doing the forbidden as
an attempt to restore one’s freedom. Indeed, taboos create
sexual ohsessiveness and perversions, but sexual obsessiveness
and perversions do not create freedom.

The rebellion of the child manifests itself in many other
ways: by the child’s not accepting the rules of cleanliness
training; by not eating, or by overeating; by aggression and
sadism, and by many kinds of self-destructive acts. Often the
rebellion manifests itself in a kind of general ‘slow-down
strike’ - a withdrawal of interest in the world, laziness,
pa.ssivity, up to the most pathological forms of slow self-
destruction. The effects of this power struggle between
children and parents is the subject of David E. Schecter’s
paper on ‘Infant Development’. All data indicate that het-
eronomous interference with the child’s and the later
person’s growth process is the deepest root of mental patho¬
logy, especially of destructiveness.

It must be clearly understood, though, that freedom is not
laissez-faire and arbitrariness. Human beings have a specific
structure - like any other species - and can grow only in
terms of this structure. Freedom does not mean freedom
/rom all guiding principles. It means the freedom to grow
according to the laws of the structure of human existence
(autonomous restrictions). It means obedience to the laws
that govern optimal human development. Any authority
that furthers this goal is ‘rational authority’ , when this
furtherance is achieved by way of helping to mobilise the
child’s activity, critical thinking, and faith in life. It is ‘ir¬
rational authority’ when it imposes on the child het-
eronomous norms that serve the purposes of the authority,
but not the purposes of the child’s specific structure.

The having mode of existence, the attitude centred on
property and profit, necessarily produces the desire - indeed

85^',,

the need - for power. To control other living human beinp
we need to use power to break their resistance. To maintain
control over private property we need to use power to pro¬
tect it from those who would take it from us because they,
like us, can never have enough; the desire to have private
property produces the desire to use violence in order to rob
others in overt or covert ways. In the having mode, one’s
happiness lies in one’s superiority over others, in one’s power,
and in the last analysis, in one’s capacity to conquer, rob, kill.
In the being mode it lies in loving, sharing, giving.

Other Factors Supporting the Having Mode

Language is an important factor in fortifying the having
orientation. The name of a person - and we all have names
(and maybe numbers if the present-day trend towards de-
personalisation continues) - creates the illusion that he or
she is an immortal being. The person and the name become
equivalent; the name demonstrates that the penson is a last¬
ing, indestructible substance - and not a process. Some
nouns have the same function: i.e. love, pride, hate, joy, give
the appearance of fixed substances, but such nouns have no
reality and only obscure the insight that we are dealing with
processes going on in a human being. But even nouns
that are names of things, such as ‘table’ or ‘lamp’, are mis¬
leading. The words indicate that we are speaking of fixed
substances, although things are nothing but a process of
energy that causes certain sensations in our bodily .system.
But these sensations are not perceptions of specific things like
table or lamp; these perceptions are the result of a cultural
process of learning, a process that makes certain sensations
assume the form of specific percepts. We naively believe
that things like tables and lamps exist as such, and we fail to
see that society teaches us to transform sensations into per¬
ceptions that permit us to manipulate the world around us in
order to enable us to survive in a given culture. Once we
have given .such percepts a name, the name seem.s to guaran¬
tee the final and unchangeable reality of the percept.

The need to have has still another foundation, the bio¬
logically given desire to live. Whether we are happy or

86

unhappy, our body impels us to strive for immortality. But
smee we know by experience that we shall die, we seek for
solutions that make us believe that, in spite of the empirical
evidence, we are immortal. This wish has taken many forms:
the belief of the Pharaohs that their bodies enshrined in the
pyramids would be immortal; many religious fantasies of life
after death, in the happy hunting grounds of hunter so¬
cieties j the Christian and Islam paradise. In contemporary
society since the eighteenth century, ‘history’ and ‘the
future’ have become the substitutes for the Christian
heaven: fame, celebrity, even notoriety - anything that
seems to guarantee a footnote in the record of history •- con¬
stitutes a bit of immortality. The craving for fame is not just
secular vanity - it has a religious quality for those who do
not believe in the traditional hereafter any more. (This is
particularly noticeable among political leaders.) Publicity
paves the way to immortality, and the public relations
agents become the new priests.

But perhaps more than anything else, possession of
property constitutes the fulfilment of the craving for immor¬
tality, and it is for this reason that the having orientation has
such strength. If my self is constituted by what I have, then I
am immortal if the things I have are indestructible. From
Ancient Egypt to today - from physical immortality, via
mummification of the body, to legal immortality, via the last
will - people have remained alive beyond their physi¬
cal/mental lifetimes. Via the legal power of the last will the
disposal of our property is determined for generations to
come; through the laws of inheritance, I - inasmuch as I am
an owner of capital become immortal.

The Having Mode and the Anal Character

A helpful approach to understanding the mode of having is
to recall one of Freud’s most significant findings, that after
going through their infant phase of mere passive receptivity
followed by a phase of aggressive exploitative receptivity all
children, before they reach maturity, go through a phase
designated the anal-erotic. Freud discovered that this phase
often remains dominant during a person’s development, and

87

that when it does it leads to the development of the anal
character, i.e. the character of a person whose main energy
in life is directed towards having, saving, and hoarding
money and material things as well as feelings, gestures,
words, energy. It is the character of the stingy individual
and is usually connected with such other traits as orderliness,
punctuality, stubbornness, each to a more than ordinary
degree. An important aspect of Freud’s concept is the sym-
bolic connection between money and faeces - gold and dirt -
of which he quotes a number of examples. His concept of the
anal character as one that has not reached maturity is in fact
a sharp criticism of bourgeois society of the nineteenth cen¬
tury, in which the qualities of the anal character constituted
the norm for moral behaviour and were looked upon as the
expression of ‘human nature’. Freud’s equation: money =
faeces, is an implicit, although not intended, criticism of the
functioning of bourgeois society and its possessiveness and
may be compared with Marx’s discussion of money in the
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts.

It is of little importance in this context that Freud be¬
lieved that a special phase of the libido development was
primary and that the character formation was secondary
(while in my opinion it is the product of the interpersonal
constellation in one’s early life and, most of all, the social
conditions conducive to its formation). What matters is
Freud’s view that tlie predominant orientation in possession
occurs in the period before the achievement of full maturity
and is pathological if it remains permanent. For Freud, in
other words, the person exclusively concerned with having
and possession is a neurotic, mentally sick person; hence it
would follow that the society in which most of the members
are anal characters is a sick society.

Asceticism and Equality

Much of the moral and political discussion has centred on
the question: To have or not to have? On the moral-
religious level this meant the alternative between the ascetic
life and the non-ascetic life, the latter including both pro¬
ductive enjoyment and unlimited pleasure. This alternative

loses most of its meaning if one’s emphasis is not on the
single act of behaviour but on the attitude underlying it.
Ascetic behaviour, with its constant preoccupation with non-
enjoyment, may be only the negation of strong desires for
having and consuming. In the ascetic these desires can be
repressed, yet in the very attempt to suppress having and
consuming, the person may be equally preoccupied with
having and consuming. This denial by over-compensation is,
as psychoanalytic data show, very frequent. It occurs in such
cases as fanatical vegetarians repressing destructive impul¬
ses, fanatical anti-abortionists repressing their murderous
impulses, fanatics of ‘virtue’ repressing their own ‘sinful’ im¬
pulses. What matters here is not a certain conviction as such,
but the fanaticism that supports it. This, like all fanaticism,
suggests the suspicion that it serves to cover other, and
usually the opposite, impulses.

In the economic and political field a similar erroneous
alternative is between unrestricted inequality and absolute
equality of income. If everybody’s possessions are functional
and personal, then whether someone has somewhat more
than another person does not constitute a social problem, for
since possession is not essential, envy does not grow. On the
other hand, those who are concerned with equality in the
sense that each one’s share must be exactly equal to anyone
else’s show that their own having orientation is as strong as
ever, except that it is denied by their preoccupation with
exact equality. Behind this concern their real motivation is
visible: envy. Those demanding that nobody should have
more than themselves are thus protecting themselves from
the envy they would feel if anyone had even an ounce more
of anything. What matters is that both luxury and poverty
shall be eradicated; equality must not mean the quantitative
equality of each inorseFof material goods, but that income is
not differentiated to a point that creates different experiences
of life for different groups, Inthe Economic and Philosophi¬
cal ManuscriptsM3.Tx pointed this out in what he calls crude
communism’, which ‘negates the personality of man in every
sphere’; this type of communism ‘is only the culmination of
such envy and levelling-down on the basis of a preconceived
minimum’.

Existential Having

In order to fully appreciate the mode of having that we are
dealing with here, yet another qualification seems necessary,
that of the function of existential having; human existence
requires that we have, keep, take care of, and use certain
things in order to survive. This holds true for our bodies, for
food, shelter, clothing and for the tools necessary to produce
our needs. This form of having may be called existential
having because it is rooted in human existence. It is a ration¬
ally directed impulse in the pursuit of staying alive - in con¬
trast to the characterological having we have been dealing
with so far, which is a passionate drive to retain and keep
that is not innate, but that has developed as the result of the
impact of social conditions on the human species as it is
biologically given.

Existential having is not in conflict with being; charac¬
terological having necessarily is. Even the ‘just’ and the
‘saintly’, inasmuch as they are human, must want to have in
the existential sense - while the average person wants to
have in the existential and in the characterological sense.
(See the earlier discussion of existential and charac¬
terological dichotomies in Man for Himself.)

QO

V

What Is the Being Mode?

Most of us know more about the mode of having than we do
about the mode of being, because having is by far the more
frequently experienced mode in our culture. But something
more important than that makes defining the mode of being
so much more diflficult than defining the mode of having,
namely the very nature of the difference between these two
modes of existence,

Having refers to things and things are fixed and de-
scrihable. Being refers to experience, and human experience ^
is in principle not describable. What is fully describable is
our persona - the mask we each wear, the ego we present -
for this persona is in itself a thing. In contrast, the living
human being is not a dead image and cannot be described
like a thing. In fact, the living human being cannot be de¬
scribed at all. Indeed, much can be said about me, about my
character, about my total orientation to life. This insightful
knowledge can go very far in understanding and describing
my own or another’s psychical structure. But the total me,.-
my whole individuality, my suchness that is as unique as my
fingerprints are, can never be fully understood, not even by
empathy, for no two human beings are identical.* Only in '
the process of mutual alive relatedness can the other and I
overcome the barrier of separateness, inasmuch as we both
participate in the dance of life. Yet our full identification
with each other can never be achieved.

Even a single act of behaviour cannot be fully described,
One could write pages of description of the Mona Lisa’s
smile, and still the pictured smile would not have been
caught in words but not because her smile is so ‘mys¬
terious’. Everybody’s smile is mysterious (unless it is the

* This is the limitation of even the best psychology a point I have
discussed in detail, comparing ‘negative psychology’ and ‘negative
theology’ in an essay, ‘On the Limitations arid Dangers of Psychology’

(1959).

■ ■ P ■■

learned, synthetic smile of the marketplace). No one can
fully describe the expression of interest, enthusiasm, bio-
philia, or of hate or narcissism that one may see in the eyes
of another person, or the variety of facial expre.ssions, of
gaits, of postures, of intonations that characterise people,

Being Active

The mode of being has as its prerequisites independence,
freedom, and the presence of critical reason. Its fundamental
characteristic is that of being active, not in the sense of out¬
ward activity, of busyness, but of inner activity, the jrroduct-
ive use of our human powers. To be active means to give
expression to one\s faculties, talents, to the wealth of Iruman
gifts with which - though in varying degrees ~ every human
being is endowed. It means to renew oneself, to grow, to flow
out, to love, to transcend the prison of one’s isolated ego, to
be interested, to ‘list’, to give. Yet none of these experiences
can be fully expressed in words. The words are vessels that
are filled with experience that overflows the ve.ssels. The
words point to an experience; they are not the experience.
The moment that I express what I experience exclusively in
thought and words, the experience has gone: it has dried up,
is dead, a mere thought. Hence being is indescribable in
words and is communicable only by sharing ray experience.
In the structure of having, the dead word rules; in the struc¬
ture of being, the alive and inexpressible experience rules.
(Of course, in the being mode there is also thinking that is
alive and productive.)

Perhaps the being mode may best be described in a symbol
suggested to me by Max Hunziger: A blue glass appears to
be blue when light shines through it because it absorbs all
other colours and thus does not let them pass. That i.s to say,
we call a glass ‘blue’ precisely becau.se it does not retain the
blue waves. It is named not for what it possesses but for what
it gives out.

Only to the extent that we decrease the mode of having,
that is of nonbeing ~ i.e. stop finding security and identity by
clinging to what we have, by ‘sitting on it’, by holding on to
our ego and our possessions - can the mode of being emerge,

Q2

‘To be’ requires giving up one’s egocentricity and selfishness,
or in words often used by the mystics, by making oneself
‘empty’ and ‘poor’.

But most people find giving up their having orientation
too difficult; any attempt to do so arouses their intense
anxiety ^ and feels like giving up all security, like being ,
thrown into the ocean when one does not know how to swim.
They do not know that when they have given up the crutch
of property, they can begin to use their own proper forces
and walk by themselves. What holds them back is the il¬
lusion that they could not walk by themselves, that they
would collapse if they were not supported by the things
they have.

Activity and Passivity

Being, in the sense we have described it, implies the faculty
of being active; passivity excludes being. However, ‘active’
and ‘passive’ are among the most misunderstood words, be¬
cause their meaning is completely different today from what
it was from classic antiquity and the Middle Ages to the
period beginning with the Renaissance. In order to under¬
stand the concept of being, the concept of activity and pass¬
ivity mast be clarified.

In modern usage activity is usually defined as a quality of
behaviour that brings about a visible effect by expenditure of
energy. Thus, for instance, farmers who cultivate their lands
are called active; so are workers on a.ssembly lines, sales¬
people who persuade their customers to buy, investors who
invest their own or other people’s money, physicians who
treat their patients, clerks who sell postage stamps, bureau¬
crats who file papers. While some of these activities may
require more interest and concentration than others, this
does not matter with regard to ‘activity’. Activity, by and
large, is socially recognised purposeful behaviour that results
in corresponding socially useful changes.

Activity in the modern sense xtim only to behaviour, not
to the person behind the behaviour. It makes no difference
whether people are active because they are driven by exter¬
nal force, like a slave, or by internal compulsion, like a

93

person driven by anxiety. It does not matter whether they
are interested in their work, like a carpenter or a creative
writer, or a scientist or a gardener; or whether they have no
inner relation to and satisfaction in what they are doing, like
the worker on the, assembly line or the postal clerk.

The modem sense of activity makes no distinction be¬
tween activity and mere busyness. But there is a fun¬
damental difference between the two that corresponds to the
terms ‘alienated’ and ‘non-alienated’ in respect to activities.
In alienated activity I do not experience myself as the acting
subject of my activity; rather, I experience the outcome of
my activity - and that as something ‘over there’, separated
from me and standing above and against me. In alienated
activity I do not really act; I am acted upon by external or
internal forces. I have become separated from the result of
my activity. The best observable case of alienated activity
in the field of psychopathology is that of compulsive-
obsessional persons. Forced by an inner urge to do something’
against their own wills - such as counting steps, repeating
certain phrases, performing certain private rituals - they can
be extremely active in the pursuit of this aim; but as psycho¬
analytic investigation has amply shown, they are driven by
an inner force that they are unaware of. An equally clear
example of alienated activity is posthypnotic behaviour.
Persons under hypnotic suggestion to do this or that upon
wakening from the hypnotic trance will do these things
without any awareness that they are not doing what they
want to do, but are following their respective hypnotists’
previously given orders.

^ In non-alienated activity, I experience myself as the sub¬
ject of my activity. Non-alienated activity is a process of
giving birth to something, of producing something and re¬
maining related to what I produce. This also implies that my
activityds a manifestation of my powers, that I and ray ac¬
tivity are one. I call this non-alienated activity productive
activity.*

‘Productive’ as used here does not refer to the capacity to
create something new or original, as an artist or scientist may

* I used the terms ‘spontaneous activity’ in Escape from Freedom and
‘productive activity’in my later writings.

94

be creative. Neither does it refer to the product of my ac¬
tivity, but to its quality. A painting or a scientific treatise
may be quite unproductive, i.e. sterile; on the other hand,
the process going on in persons who are aware of themselves
in depth, or who truly ‘see’ a tree rather than just look at it,
or who read a poem and experience in themselves the move¬
ment of feelings the poet has expressed in words - that
process may be very productive, although nothing is ‘pro¬
duced’. Productive activity denotes the state of inner ac¬
tivity; it does not necessarily have a connection with the
creation of a work of art, of science, or of something ‘useful’.
Productiveness is a character orientation all human beings
are capable of, to the extent that they are not emotionally
crippled. Productive persons animate whatever they touch.
They give birth to their own faculties and bring life to other
persons and to things.

‘Activity’ and ‘passivity’ can each have two entirely
different meanings, Alienated activity, in the sense of mere
busyness, is actually ‘passivity’, in the sense of productivity;
while passivity, in terms of non-busyness, may be non-alien¬
ated activity. This is so difficult to understand today because
most activity is alienated ‘passivity’, while productive passivity
is rarely experienced.

Activity - Passivity, According to the Masters op
Thought

‘Activity’ and ‘passivity’ were not used in the current sense in
the philosophical tradition of preindustrial society. They
hardly could have been, since the alienation of work had not
reached a point comparable to the one existing now. For this
reason such philosophers as Aristotle do not even make a
clear-cut distinction between ‘activity’ and mere ‘busyness’.
In Athens, alienated work was done only by slaves; work
which involved bodily labour seems to have been excluded
from the concept, of praxis '(‘practice’,) a term that refers
only to almost any kind of activity a free person is likely to
perform, and essentially the term Aristotle used for a
person’s free activity. (See Nicholas Lobkowicz, Theoiy

and Practice.) Considering this background, the problem of
subjectively meaningless, alienated, purely routinised work
could hardly arise for free Athenians. Their freedom implied
precisely that because they were not slaves, their activity was
productive and meaningful to them.

I’hat Aristotle did not share our present concepts of ac¬
tivity and passivity becomes unmistakably clear if we will
consider that for him the highest form of praxis, i.e. of ac¬
tivity - even above political activity - is the contemplative
life, devoted to the search for truth. The idea that con¬
templation was a form of inactivity was unthinkable for him.
Aristotle considers contemplative life the activity of the best
part in us, the nous. The slave can enjoy sensuous pleasure,
even as the free do. But eudaimonia, ‘well-being’, consists
not in pleasures but in activities in accordance with virtue
{Nichomachean Ethics, 1 1 77a, 2 ff.).

Like Aristotle’s, Thomas Aquinas’’ position is also in con¬
trast to the modem concept of activity. For Aquinas, too, the
life devoted to inner stillness and spiritual knowledge, the
vita contempiativa, is the highest form of human activity.
He concedes that the daily life, the vita activa, of the aver¬
age person, is also valuable, and it leads to well-being {beat-
itudo), provided - and this qualification is crucial - that the
aim towards which all one’s activities are directed is well¬
being and that one is able to control one’s passions and one’s
body (Thomas Aquinas, Summa, 2-2:182,183; i~2:4,6).

While Aquinas’ attitude is one of a certain compromise,
the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, a contemporary of
Master Eckhart, argues sharply against the value of the
active life, while Eckhart, on the other hand, speaks out very
much in favour of it. The contradiction is not as sharp as it
may appear, however, because all agree that activity is
‘wholesome’ only when it is rooted in and expresses the ul¬
timate ethical and spiritual demands. For this reason, for all
these teachers, busyness, i.e. activity separated from people’s
spiritual ground, is to be rejected.*

* The writings of W. Lange, N. Lobkowicz, and D. Mieth {1971) can
provide further insights into this problem of contemplative life and
active life.

96

, As a person and as a thinker Spinoza embodied the spirit
j\ and the values that were alive in Eckhart’s time,'roughly
four centuries earlier; yet he also keenly observed the
I ■ changes that had occurred in society and in the average
. j person. He was the founder of modern scientific psychology;

I • one of the discoverers of the dimension of the unconscious,

i and with this enriched insight he gave a more systematic and

; precise analysis of the difference between activity and pass-

I ' ivity than had any of his predecessors,
j Iri his Ethics, Spinoza distinguishes between activity and
I passivity (to act and to suffer) as the two fundamental

I aspects of the mind’s operation. The first criterion for acting

■ is that an action follows from human nature: ‘I say that we

j act^when anything is done, either within us or without us, of

j which we are the adequate cause, that is to say, when from

I our nature anything follows, either within or without us,

j which by that nature alone can be clearly and distinctly

j understood. On the other hand I say that we suffer [i.e. in

i Spinoza’s sense, are passive] when anything is done within

. us, or when anything follows from our nature of which we

. are not the cause except partially’ {Ethics, 3, def. 2).
j These sentences are difficult for the modern reader, who is
I - accustomed to think that the term ‘human nature’ does not

I . correspond to any demonstrable empirical data. But for

Spinoza, as for Aristotle, this is not so; nor is it for some
contemporary neurophysiologists, biologists, and psycho¬
logists. Spinoza believes that human nature is as charac¬
teristic for human beings as horse nature is for the horse;
\ furthermore, that goodness or badness, success or failure,
'I well-being or suffering, activity or passivity depend on the
I _ degree to which persons succeed in achieving the optimal

i realisation of their species nature. The closer we are to arriv-

; ing at the model of human nature, the greater are our

•j freedom and our well-being.

[. In Spinoza’s model of human beings the attribute of ac-
I tivity is inseparable from another; reason. Inasmuch as we

i act in accordance with the conditions of our existence and are

I aware of these conditions as real and necessary ones, we know
^ the truth about ourselves. ‘Our mind acts at times and at

V, 97 ■.

times suffers; in so far as it has adequate ideas, it necessarily |

acts: and in so far as it has inadequate ideas, it necessarily j

suffers’ [EthicSi 3, prop. i).

Desires are divided into active and passive ones {actiones
and passiones). The former are rooted in the conditions of
our existence (the natural and not the pathological dis¬
tortions), and the latter are not thus rooted but are caused by
inner or outer distorting conditions. The former exist to the ;
extent that we are free; the latter are caused by inner or i

outer force. All ‘active affects’ are necessarily good: 1

‘passions’ can be good or evil. According to Spinoza, activity, j

reason, freedom, well-being, joy, and self-perfection are in- |

separably connected in the same way as passivity, irration- 1

ality, bondage, sadness, powerlessness, and strivings contrary |

to the demands of human nature are {Ethics, 4, app. 2,3,5; I

pmps. 40,42), ^ j

One understands Spinoza’s ideas about passions and pass- \
ivity fully only if one proceeds to the last - and most modem |

- step of his thinking: that to be driven by irrational passions 1

is to be mentally sick. To the degree that we achieve optimal i

growth, we are not only (relatively) free, strong, rational, |

and joyous but also mentally healthy; to the degree that we i

fail to reach this aim, we are unfree, weak, lacking ration- [

ality, and depressed. Spinoza, to my knowledge, was the first I

modern thinker to postulate that mental health and .sickness i

are outcomes of right and wrong living respectively. [

For Spinoza mental health is, in the last analysis, a mani- '

festation of right living; mental illness, a symptom of the
failure to live according to the requirements of human j
nature. ‘But if the greedy person thinks only of money and
possessions, the ambitious one only of fame, one does not i.

think of them as being insane, but only as annoying; gen- f

erally one has contempt for them. But factually, greediness, .[

ambition, and so forth are forms of insanity, although [

usually one does not think of them as “illness” ’ {Ethics, 4, }

prop. 44). In this statement, so foreign to the thinking of our : j
time, Spinoza considers passions that do not correspond to i

the needs of human nature as pathological; in fact, he goes ■

so far as to call them a form of insani ty. ^ j

Spinoza’s concepts of activity and passivity are a most rad- |

98:,v:

ical critique of industrial society. In contrast to today’s belief
that persons driven mainly by greed for money, possession, :
or fame are normal and well adjusted, they are considered by '
Spinoza utterly passive and basically sick. The active persons
in Spinoza’s sense, which he personified in his own life, have
become exceptions, and are somewhat suspected of being
‘neurotic’ because they are so little adapted to so-called
normal activity.

Marx wrote (in the Economic and Philosophical Manu¬
scripts) that ‘free conscious activity’ (i.e. human activity) is
‘the species character of man’. Labour, for him, represents
human activity, and human activity is life. Capital, on the j
other hand, represents for Marx the amassed, the past, and ^
in the last analysis, the dead {Grundrisse), One cannot fully
understand the affective charge which the struggle between
capital and labour had for Marx unless one considers that
for him it was the fight between aliveness and deadness, the
present versus the past, people versus things, being versus
having. For Marx the question was: Who should rule whom
- should life rule the dead, or the dead rule life? Socialism,
for him, represented a society in which life had won over the
dead.

Marx’s whole critique of capitalism and his vision of
socialism are rooted in the concept that human self-activity
is paralysed in the capitalist system and that the goal is to re¬
store full humanity by restoring activity in all spheres of life.

Despite the formulations influenced by the classic econ¬
omists, the cliche that Marx was a determinist, making
human beings the passive object of history and depriving
them of their activity, is the very opposite of his thinking, as
any who themselves read Marx, rather than a few isolated
sentences taken out of context, will be easily convinced. '
Marx’s views could not be more clearly expressed than they
are in his own statement: ‘Flistory does nothing; it posses.ses
no colossal riches, it “fights no fight”. It is rather man - real,
living man who acts, possesses and fights everything. It is
by no means “History” which uses man as a means to carry
out its ends as if it were a person apart ; rather History is
nothing but the activity of man in pursuit of his ends’ (Marx
and Engels,TAe i/o/y Family).

99

Of near contemporaries none has perceived the passive
character of modern activity as penetratingly as has Albert
Schweitzerj who^ in his study of the decay and restoration of
civilisation, saw modern Man as iinfree, incomplete, uncon¬
centrated, pathologically dependent, and ‘absolutely pass¬
ive’.

Being as Reality

Thus far I have described the meaning of being by
contrasting it to having. But a second, equally important
meaning of being is revealed by contrasting it to appearing.
If I appear to be kind while my kindness is only a mask to
cover my exploitativeness - if I appear to be courageous
while I am extremely vain or perhaps suicidal -• if I appear
to love my country while I am furthering my selfish
interests, the appearance, i.e. my overt behaviour, is in dras¬
tic contradiction to the reality of forces that motivate me.
My behaviour is different from my character. My character
structure, the true motivation of my behaviour, constitutes
ray real being. My behaviour may partly reflect my being,
but it is usually a mask that I have and that I wear for ray
own purposes. Behaviourism deals with this ma.sk as if it
were a reliable scientific datum; true insight is focused on
the inner reality, which is usually neither conscious nor
directly observable. This concept of being as ‘unmasking’, as
is expressed by Eckhart, is central in Spinoza’s and Marx’s
thought and is the fundamental discovery of Freud. -
To understand the discrepancy between behaviour and
character, between my mask and the reality it hides, is the
main achievement of Freud’s psychoanalysis. He devised a
method^ (free association, analysis of dreams, transference,
and resistance) that aimed at uncovering the instinctual (es¬
sentially sexual) desires that had been repre.ssed in early
childhood. Even when later developments in psychoanalytic
theory and therapy proceeded to emphasise traumatic events'
in the field of early interpersonal relations rather than of
instinctual life, the principle remained the same: What is
repressed are early and - as I believe - later traumatic
desires and fears; the way to recovery from sympto ms or

from a more general malaise lies in uncovering this repressed
material. In other words, what is repressed are the irrational,
infantile, and individual elements of experience.

On the other hand, the common-sense views of a normal,
i.e. socially adapted, citizen were supposed to be rational and
not iri need of depth analysis. But this is not true at all. Our
conscious motivations, ideas, and beliefs are a blend of false
information, biases, irrational passions, rationalisations,
prejudices in which morsels of truth swim around and give
the reassurance albeit false, that the whole mixture is real
and true. The thinking process attempts to organise this
whole cesspool of illusions according to the laws of logic and
plausibility. This level of consciousness is supposed to reflect
reality; it is the map we use for organising our life. This false
map is not repressed. What is repressed is the knowledge of
reality, the knowledge of what is true. If we ask, then: What
is uficonscious? the answer must be: Aside from irrational
passions, almost the whole of knowledge of reality. The un¬
conscious is basically determined by society, which produces
irrational passions and provides its members with various
kinds of fiction and thus forces the truth to become the pris¬
oner of the alleged rationality.

Stating that the truth is repressed is based, of course, on
the premise that we know the truth and repress this knowl¬
edge; in other words, that there is ‘unconscious knowledge’.
My experience in psychoanalysis - of others and of myself -
is that this is indeed true. We perceive reality, and we cannot
help perceiving it. Just as our senses are organised to see,
hear, smell, touch when we are brought together with re¬
ality, our reason is organised to recognise reality, i.e. to see
things as they are, to perceive the truth. Tam not of course
referring to the part of reality that requires scientific tools or
methods in order to be perceived. l am referring to what is
recognisable by concentrated ‘seeing^ especially the reality
in ourselves and in others. We know when we meet a danger¬
ous person, when we meet somebody we can fully trust; we
know when we are lied to, or exploited, or fooled, when we
have sold ourselves a bill of goods. We know almost every¬
thing that is important to know about human behaviour,
just as our ancestors had a remarkable knowledge about the

movements of the stars. But while they were aware of their
knowledge and used it, we repress our knowledge immedi¬
ately, because if it were conscious it would make life too
difficult and, as we persuade ourselves, too ‘dangerous’.

The proof of this statement is easy to find. It exists in many
dreams in which we exhibit a deep insight into the essence of
other people, and of ourselves, v^^hich we completely lack in
the daytime. (I included examples of ‘insight dreams’ in The
Forgotten Language.) It is evidenced in those frequent reac¬
tions in which we suddenly see .somebody in an entirely
different light, and then feel as if we had had this knowl¬
edge all the time before. It can be found in the phenomenon
of resistance when the painful truth threatens to come to the
surface; in slips of the tongue, in awkward expressions, in a
state of trance, or in instances when a person says something,
as if in an aside, that is the very opposite of what he or she
always claimed to believe, and then seems to have forgotten
this aside a minute later. Indeed, a great deal of our energy is
used to hide from ourselves what we know, and the degree of
such repressed knowledge can hardly be overestimated. A
Talmudic legend has expressed this concept of the repression
of the truth, in a poetic form: when a child is born, an angel
touches its forehead, so that it forgets the knowledge of the
truth that it has at the moment of birth. If the child did not
forget, later life would become unbearable.

Returning to our main thesis: Being refers to the real, in
contrast to the falsified, illusionary picture. In this sense, any j

attempt to increase the sector of being means increased in- I

sight into the reality of one’s self, of others, of the world j

around us. The main ethical goals of Judaism and Chris¬
tianity - overcoming greed and hate - cannot be realised with¬
out another factor that is central in Buddhism even though it ;

plays also a role in Judaism and in Christianity: The way to i

being lies in penetrating the surface and grasping reality.

j:

TheWill to Give, to Share, to Sacrifice ;

In contemporary society the having mode of existing is as- i
sumed to be rooted in human nature and, hence, virtually t
unchangeable. The same idea is expressed in the dogma that |

people are basically lazy, passive by nature, and that they do
not want to work or to do anything else, unless they are
driven by the incentive of material gain ... or hunger... or
the fear of punishment, This dogma is doubted by hardly
anybody, and it determines our methods of education and of
work. But it is little more than an expression of the wish to
prove the value of our social arrangements by imputing to
them that they follow the needs of human nature. To the
members of many different societies of both past and pre¬
sent, the concept of innate human selfishness and laziness
would appear as fantastic as the reverse sounds to us.

The truth is that both the having and the being modes of
existence are potentialities of human nature, that our bio¬
logical urge for survival tends to further the having mode,
but that selfishness and laziness are not the only propensities
inherent in human beings.

We human beings have an inherent and deeply rooted
desire to be: to express our faculties, to be active, to be re¬
lated to others, to escape the prison cell of selfishness. The
truth of this statement is proven by so much evidence that a
whole volume could easily be filled with it. D. 0 . Hebb has
formulated the gist of the problem in the most general form
by stating that the only behavioural problem is to account
for inactivity, not for activity. The following data are evi¬
dence for this general thesis :*

1. The data on animal behaviour. Experiments and direct
observation show that many species undertake difficult tasks
with pleasure, even when no material rewards are offered.

2. Neurophysiological experiments demonstrate the ac¬
tivity in the nerve cells,

3. Infantile behaviour. Recent studies show the capacity
and need of small infants to respond actively to complicated
stimuli - findings in contrast to Freud’s assumption that the
infant experiences the outside stimulus as a threat and that it
mobilises its aggressiveness in order to remove the threat,

4. Learning behaviour. Many studies show that the child
and adole.scent are lazy because learning material is pre-

* I have dealt with some of this , evidence in , T/is Anatomy of Human
Destructiveness,

102

sented to them in a dry and dead way that is incapable of
arousing their genuine interest; if the pressure and the bore¬
dom are removed and the material is presented in an alive
way, remarkable activity and initiative are mobilised.

5. Work behaviour. E. Mayo’s classic experiment has
shown that even work which in itself is boring becomes
interesting if the workers know that they are participating in
an experiment conducted by an alive and gifted person who
has the capacity to arouse their curiosity and their par¬
ticipation. The same has been shown in a number of factor¬
ies in Europe and in the United States. The managers’
stereotype of the workers is: workers are not really interested
in active participation; all they want are higher wages,
hence profit sharing might be an incentive for higher work
productivity, but not the workers’ participation. While the
managers are right as far as the work methods they offer are
concerned, experience has shown - and has convinced not a
few managers - that if the workers can be truly active, re¬
sponsible, and knowledgeable in their work role, the form¬
erly uninterested ones change considerably and show a
remarkable degree of inventiveness, activity, imagination,
and satisfaction.*

6. The wealth of data to be found in social and political
life. The belief that people do not want to make sacrifices is
notoriously wrong. When Churchill announced at the be¬
ginning of the Second World War that what he had to
demand from the British was blood, sweat and tears, he did
not deter them, but on the contrary, he appealed to their
deep-seated human desire to make sacrifices, to give of them¬
selves. The reaction of the British -- and of the Germans and
the Russians as well - towards the indiscriminate bombing of
population centres by the belligerents proves that common
suffering did not weaken their spirit; it strengthened their
resistance and proved wrong those who believed terror

* In his forthcoming book The Gamesmen; The New Corporate leaders
(which I was privileged to read in manuscript), Michael Maccoby
mentions some recent democratic participatory projects, especially his
own research in The Bolivar Project, Bolivar is dealt with in the working
papers on that project and will be the subject, along with another
project, of a larger work that Maccoby is presently planning.

104

bombing could break the morale of the enemy and help
finish the war.

, . > It is a sad commentary on our civilisation, however, that
war and suffering rather than peacetime living can mobilise
human readiness to make sacrifices, and that the times of
peace seem mainly to encourage selfishness. Fortunately,
there are situations in peacetime in which human strivings
for giving and solidarity manifest themselves in individual
behaviour, The workers’ strikes, especially up to the period
of the First World War, are an example of such essentially
. non-violent behaviour. The workers sought higher wages,
but at the same time, they risked and accepted severe hard¬
ships in order to fight for their own dignity and the satisfac¬
tion of experiencing human solidarity. The strike was as
much a ‘religious’ as an economic phenomenon. While such
strikes still do occur even today, most present-day strikes are
for economic reasons - although strikes for bptter working
conditions have increased recently.

The need to give and to share and the willingness to make
sacrifices for others are still to be found among the members
[ of certain professions, such as nurses, physicians, monks, and
nuns. The goal of helping and sacrificing is given only lip
service by many, if not most, of these professionals; yet the
character of a goodly number corresponds to the values they
profess. We find the same needs affirmed and expressed in
I many communes throughout the centuries, whether religious,

! socialist, or humanist. We find the wish to give in the people
who volunteer their blood (without payment), in the many
situations in which people risk their lives to save another’s.
We find the manifestation of the will to give in people who
genuinely love. ‘False love,’ i.e. shared mutual selfishness,
? makes people more selfish (and this is the case often enough).

Genuine love increases the capacity to love and to give to
others. The true lover loves the whole world, in his or her
love for a specific person.*

One of the most important sources for understanding the natural
human impulse to give and to share is P. A. Kropotkin’s classic, Mnlml
Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902) . Two other important works are The
Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy by Richard Titmuss
(in which he points to the manifestations of the people’s wish to give, and

105

Conversely, we find that not a few people, especially
younger ones, cannot stand the luxury and selfishness that
surround them in their affluent families. Quite against the
expectations of their elders, who think that their children
'have everything they wish’, they rebel against the deadness
and isolation of their lives. For the fact is, they do not have
everything they wish and they wish for what they do not
have.

Outstanding examples of such people from past history
are the sons and daughters of the rich in the Roman Empire,
who embraced the religion of poverty and love; another is
the Buddha, who was a prince and had every pleasure and
luxury that he could possibly want, but discovered that
having and consuming cause unhappiness and suffering. A
more recent example (second half of the nineteenth centry)
is the sons and daughters of the Russian upper class, the Nar-^
odniki. Finding themselves no longer able to stand the life of
idleness and injustice they had been born into, these young
people left their families and joined the poor peasants, lived
with them, and helped to lay one of the foundations of the
revolutionary struggle in Russia.

We can witness' a similar phenomenon among the sons
and daughters of the well-to-do in the United States and
Germany, who see their life in their affluent home environ¬
ment as boring and meaningless. But more than that, they
find the world’s callousness towards the poor and the drift
towards nuclear war for the sake of individual egotism un¬
bearable. Thus, they move away from their home environ¬
ment, looking for a new lifestyle - and remain unsatisfied
because no constructive effort seems to have a chance. Many
among them were originally the most idealistic and sensitive
of the young generation; but at this point, lacking in tradi¬
tion, maturity, experience, and political wisdom, they
become desperate, narcissistically overestimate their own ca¬
pacities and possibilities, and try to achieve the impossible
by the use of force. They form so-called revolutionary

stresses that our economic system prevents people from freely exercising
their right to give), and Edmund S. Phelps, ed., Altruism, Morality and
Economk Theory,

io6

groups and expect to save the world by acts of terror and
destruction, not seeing that they are only contributing to the
general tendency to violence and inhumanity. They have
lost their capacity to love and have replaced it with the wish
to_ sacrifice their lives. (Self-sacrifice is frequently the sol¬
ution for individuals who ardently desire to love, but who
have lost the capacity to love and see in the sacrifice of their
own lives an experience of love in the highest degree.) But
these self-sacrificing young people are very different from
the loving martyrs, who want to live because they love life
and who accept death only when they are forced to die in
order not to betray themselves. Our present-day self-
sacrificing young people are the accused, but they are also
the accusers, in demonstrating that in our social system some
of the very best young people become so isolated and hopeless
that nothing but destruction and fanaticism are left as a way
out of their despair.

The human desire to experience union with others is
rooted in the specific conditions of existence that charac¬
terise the human species and is one of the strongest motiva¬
tors of human behaviour. By the combination of minimal
instinctive determination and maximal development of the
capacity for reason, we human beings have lost our original
oneness with nature. In order not to feel utterly isolated
which would, in fact, condemn us to insanity - we need to
find a new unity: with our fellow beings and with nature.
This human need for unity with others is experienced in
many ways: in the symbiotic tie to mother, an idol, one’s
tribe, one’s nation, one’s class, one’s religion, one’s fraternity,
one’s professional organisation. Often, of course, these ties
overlap, and often they assume an ecstatic form, as among
members of certain religious sects or of a lynch mob, or in
the outbursts of national hysteria in the case of war. The
outbreak of the First World War, for example, occasioned
one of the most drastic of these ecstatic forms of ‘union’.
Suddenly, from one day to the next, people gave up their
lifelong convictions of pacifismj antimilitarism, socialism;
scientists threw away their lifelong training in objectivity,
critical thinking, and impartiality in order to join the big
We.

107

The desire to experience union with others manifests itself
in the lowest kind of behaviourj i.e. in acts of sadism and
destruction, as well as in the highest: solidarity on the basis
of an ideal or conviction. It is also the main cause of the
need to adapt; human beings are more afraid of being out¬
casts than even of dying. Crucial to every society is the kind
of union and solidarity it fosters and the kind it can further,
under the given conditions of its socioeconomic structure.

These considerations seem to indicate that both ten¬
dencies are present in human beings: the one, to have - to
possess - that owes its strength in the last analysis to the
biological factor of the desire for survival; the other, to be -
to share, to give, to sacrifice ~ that owes its strength to the
specific conditions of human existence and the inherent need
to overcome one’s isolation by oneness with others. From
these two contradictory strivings in every human being it
follows that the social structure, its values and norms,
decides which of the two becomes dominant. Cultures that
foster the greed for possession, and thus the having mode of
existence, are rooted in one human potential; cultures that
foster being and sharing are rooted in the other potential.
We must decide which of the.se two potentials we want to
cultivate, realising, however, that our decision is largely de¬
termined by the socioeconomic structure of a given society
that inclines us towards one or the other solution.

From my observations in the field of group behaviour my
best gues.s is that the two extreme groups, respectively mani¬
festing deeply ingrained and almost unalterable types of
having and of being, form a small minority; that in the vast
majority both possibilities are real, and which of the two
becomes dominant and which is repressed depends on en¬
vironmental factors.

This assumption contradicts a widely held p.sychoanalytic
dogma that environment produces essential change.? in per¬
sonality development in infancy and early childhood, but
that after this period the character is fixed and hardly
changed by external events. This psychoanalytic dogma has
been able to gain acceptance because the basic conditions of
their childhood continue into most people’s later life, since
in general, the same social conditions continue to exist. But

numerous instances exist in which a drastic change in en¬
vironment leads to a fundamental change in behaviour, i.e.
when the negative forces cease to be fed and the positive
forces are nurtured and encouraged.

To sum up, the frequency and intensity of the desire to
share, to give, and to sacrifice are not surprising if we con¬
sider the conditions of existence of the human species. What
is surprising is that this need could be so repressed as to make
acts of selfishness the rule in industrial (and many other)
societies and acts of solidarity the exception. But, para¬
doxically, this very phenomenon is caused by the need for
union. A society whose principles are acquisition, profit, and
property produces a social character oriented around
having, and once the dominant pattern is established,
nobody wants to be an outsider, or indeed an outcast; in
order to avoid this risk everybody adapts to the majority,
who have in common only their mutual antagonism.

As a consequence of the dominant attitude of selfishness,
the leaders of our society believe that people can be moti¬
vated only by the expectation of material advantages, i.e. by
rewards, and that they will not react to appeals for solidarity
and sacrifice. Hence, except in times of war, these appeals are
rarely made, and the chances to observe the possible results
of such appeals are lost.

Only a radically different socioeconomic structure and a
radically different picture of human nature could show that
bribery is not the only way (or the best way) to influence
people.

VI

Further Aspects of Having and Being

Security ~ Insecurity

Not to move forward, to stay where we are, to regress, in
other words to rely on what we have, is very tempting, for
what we have, we know; we can hold on to it, feel secure in
it. We fear, and consequently avoid, taking a step into the
unknown, the uncertain; for, indeed, while the step may not
appear risky to us after we have taken it, before we take that
step the new aspects beyond it appear very risky, and hence
frightening. Only the old, the tried, is safe; or so it seems.
Every new step contains the danger of failure, and that is one
of the reasons people are so afraid of freedom.*

Naturally, at every stage of life ‘the old and accustomed’ is
different. As infants we have only our body and our mother’s
breasts (originally still undifferentiated). Then we start to
orient ourselves to the world, beginning the process of
making a place for ourselves in it. We begin wanting to have
things: we have our mother, father, siblings, toys; later on
we acquire knowledge, a job, a social position, a spouse, chil¬
dren, and then we have a kind of afterlife already, when we
acquire a burial plot and life insurance and make our ‘last
will’.

Yet in spite of the security of having, people admire those
with a vision of the new, those who break a new path, who
have the courage to move forward. In mythology this mode
of existence is represented symbolically by the hero. Heroes
are those with the courage to leave what they have - their
land, their family, their property ~ and move out, not with¬
out fearj but without succumbing to their fear. In the Bud¬
dhist tradition the Buddha is the hero who leaves all
possessions, all certainty contained in Hindu theology - his
rank, his family - and moves on to a life of non-attachment.
Abraham and Moses are heroes in the Jewish tradition. The

* This is the main topic in Escape from Eteedom.

110

Christian hero is Jesus, who had nothing and - in the eyes of
the world - is nothing, yet who acts out of the fullness of his
love for all human beings. The Greeks have secular heroes,
whose aim is victory, satisfaction of their pride, conquest.
Yet, like the spiritual heroes, Hercules and OdyLeus move
forward, undeterred by the risks and dangers that await
them. The fairy tale heroes meet the same criteria: leaving,
moving forward, and tolerating uncertainty.

We admire the.se heroes because we deeply feel their way
is the way we would want to be ~ if we could. But being
afraid, we believe that we cannot be that way, that only the
heroes can. The heroes become idols; we transfer to them
our own capacity to move, and then stay where we are -
‘because we are not heroes’.

This di,scu.ssion might seem to imply that while being a
hero is desirable, it is foolish and against one’s self-interest.
Not so, by any means. The cautious, the having persons
enjoy security, yet by necessity they are very insecure. They
depend on what they have: money, prestige, their ego “ that
is to say, on something outside themselves. But what
becomes of them if they lose what they have? For, indeed,
whatever one has can be lost. Most obviously, one’s property
can be lost - and with it usually one’s position, one’s friends -
and at any moment one can, and .sooner or later one is bound
to, lose one’s life. .

If I am what I have and if what I have is lost, who then
am U Nobody but a defeated, deflated, pathetic testimony
iO a wrong way of living. Because I can lose what I have, I
am nece.ssarily constantly worried that I shall lose what I
have. I am afraid of thieves, of economic changes, of revo¬
lutions, of sickness, of death, and I am afraid of love, of free¬
dom, of growtli, of change, of the unknown. Thus I am
continuously worried, suffering from a chronic hypochondri¬
asis, with regard not only to loss of health, but to any other
loss of what I have; I become defensive, hard, suspicious,
lonely, driven by the need to have more in order to be better
protected. Ibsen has given a beautiful description of this self-
centred person in his Peer Gynt, The hero is filled only with
himself; in his extreme egoism he believes that he Is himself,
because he is a ‘bundle of desires’. At the end of his life he

recognises that because of his property-structured existence,
he has failed to be himself, that he is like an onion without a
kernel, an unfinished man, who never was himself.

The anxiety and insecurity engendered by the danger of
losing what one has are absent in the being mode. If I am
who I am and not what I have, nobody can deprive me of or
threaten my security and my sense of identity. My centre is
within myself; my capacity for being and for expressing my
essential powers is part of my character structure and
depends on me. This holds true for the normal process of
living, not, of course, for such circumstances as inca¬
pacitating illness, torture, or other cases of powerful exter¬
nal restrictions.

While having is based on some thing that is diminished by
use, being grows by practice. (The ‘burning bush’ that is not
consumed is the biblical symbol for this paradox.) The
powers of reason, of love, of artistic and intellectual creation,
all essential powers grow through the process of being ex¬
pressed. What is spent is not lost, but on the contrary, what is
kept is lost. The only threat to my security in being lies in
myself: lack of faith in life and in my productive powers; in
regressive tendencies; in inner laziness and in the willingness
to have others take over my life. But these dangers are not
inherent in being, as the danger of losing is inherent in
having.

Solidarity - Antagonism

The experience of loving, liking, enjoying something with¬
out wanting to have it is the one Suzuki referred to in con¬
trasting the Japanese and the English poems (.see Chapter I).
It is indeed not easy for modern Western Man to experience
enjoyment separate from having. However, neither is it en¬
tirely foreign to us. Suzuki’s example of the flower would not
apply if instead of looking at the flower the wanderer looked
at a mountain, a meadow, or anything that cannot be physi¬
cally taken away. To be sure, many, or most, people would
not really see the mountain, except as a cliche; instead of
seeing it they would want to know its name and its height -
or they might want to climb it, which can be another form of
taking possession of it. But some can genuinely see the raoun-

113

tain and enjoy it. The same may be said in respect to ap¬
preciating works of music: that is, buying a recording of
music one loves can be an act of possessing the work, and
I perhaps the majority of people who enjoy art really do ‘con-
I sume’ it; but a minority probably still responds to music and
I art with genuine joy and without any impulse to ‘have’.

I Sometimes one can read people’s responses in their facial

j expressions. I recently saw a television film of the extra-

; orclinary acrobats and jugglers of the Chinese circus during

^ which the camera repeatedly surveyed the audience, to

I register the response of individuals in the crowd. Most of the

faces were lit up, brought to life, became beautified in re-
i sponse to the graceful, alive performance. Only a minority
I seemed cold and unmoved.

j Another example of enjoying without wanting to possess

I may be readily seen in our response to small children. Here,

j too, I suspect a great deal of self-deceptive behaviour takes

I place, for we like to see ourselves in the role of lovers of

I children. But even though there may be reason for suspicion,

I I believe that genuine, alive response to infants is not at all

j rare. This may be partly so because, in contrast to their feel-

j ings about adolescents and adults, most people are not afraid

1 of children and so feel free to respond to them lovingly,

i which we cannot do if fear stands in our way.

I The most relevant example for enjoyment without the

f craving to have what one enjoys may be found in inter-

I personal relations. A man and a woman may enjoy each

! other on many grounds; each may like the other’s attitudes,

I tastes, ideas, temperament, or whole personality. Yet only in

j, those who must have what they like will this mutual enjoy-

; ment habitually result in the desire for sexual possession. For

; those in a dominant mode of being, the other person is enjoy-

i able, and even erotically attractive, but she or he does not

j have to be ‘plucked’, to speak in terms of Tennyson’s poem,
i in order to be enjoyed.

Flaving-centred persons want to have the person they like
h or admire. This can be seen in relations between parents and
their children, between teachers and students, and between
( friends. Neither partner is sati.sfied simply to enjoy the other
person; each wishes to have the other person for him- or her-

i : ' : II3

self. Hence, each is jealous of those who also want to ‘have’
the other. Each partner seeks the other like a shipwrecked
sailor seeks a plank - for survival. Predominantly ‘having
relationships are heavy, burdened, filled with conflicts and
jealousies.

Speaking more generally, the fundamental elements in the
relation between individuals in the having mode of existence
are competition, antagonism, and fear. The antagonistic ele¬
ment in the having relationship stems from its nature. If
having is the basis of my sense of identity because ‘I am what
I have’, the wish to have must lead to the desire to have
much, to have more, to have most. In other words, greed is
the natural outcome of the having orientation. It can be the
greed of the miser or the greed of the profit hunter or the
greed of the womaniser or the man chaser. Whatever consti¬
tutes their greed, the greedy can never have enough, can never
be ‘satisfied’. In contrast to physiological needs, such as hun¬
ger, that have definite satiation points due to the physiologyof
the body, mentfl/ greed - and all greed is mental, even if it is
satisfied via the body - has no satiation point, since its cori-
summation does not fill the inner emptiness, boredom, loiieli-

ness, and depression it is meant to overcome. In addition,
since what one has can be taken away in one form ^ or
another, one must have more, in order to fortify one’s exist¬
ence against such danger. If everyone wants to have more,
everyone must fear one’s neighbour’s aggressive intention to
take away what one has, To prevent such attack one must
become more powerful and preventively aggressive oneself.
Besides, since production, great as it may be, can never keep
pace with unlimited desires, there must be competition and
antagonism among individuals in the struggle for getting the

most. And the strife would continue even if a state of ab¬
solute abundance could be reached; those who have less in
physical health and in attractiveness, in gifts, in talents
would bitterly envy those who have ‘more’.

That the having mode and the resulting greed necessarily
lead to interpersonal antagonism and strife holds true for
nations as it does for individuals. For as long as nations are
composed of people whose main motivation is having and
greed, they cannot help waging war. They necessarily covet

what another nation has, and attempt to get what they want
by war, economic pressure, or threats. They will use these
procedures against weaker nations, first of all, and form al¬
liances that are stronger than the nation that is to be at¬
tacked. Even if it has only a reasonable chance to win, a
nation will wage war, not because it suffers economically,
l3ut because the desire to have more and to conquer is deeply
ingrained in the social character.

Of course there are times of peace. But one must dis¬
tinguish between lasting peace and peace that is a transitory
phenomenon, a period of gathering strength, rebuilding
one’s industry and army - in other words, between peace
that is a permanent state of harmony and peace that is essen¬
tially only a truce. While the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies had periods of truce, they are characterised by a state
of chronic war among the main actors on the historical
stage. Peace as a state of lasting harmonious relations be¬
tween nations is only possible when the having structure is
replaced by the being structure. The idea that one can build
peace while ericouraging the striving for possession and
profit is an illusion, and a dangerous one, because it deprives
people of recognising that they are confronted with a clear
alternative: either a radical change of their character or the
perpetuity of war. This is indeed an old alternative; the
leaders have chosen war and the people followed them.
Today and tomorrow, with the incredible increase in the
destructiveness of the new weapons, the alternative is no
longer war - but mutual suicide.

What holds true of international wars is equally true for
class war. The war between classes, essentially the exploiting
and the exploited, has always existed in societies that were
based on the principle of greed, There was no class war
where there was no need for nor a possibility of exploitation.
But there are bound to be classes in any society, even the
richest, in which the having mode is dominant. As already
noted, given unlimited desires, even the greatest production
cannot keep pace with everybody’s fantasy of having more
than their neighbours. Necessarily, those who are stronger,
more clever, or more favoured by other circumstances will
try to establish a favoured position for themselves and try to

take advantage of those who are less powerful, either by
force and violence or by suggestion. Oppressed classes will
overthrow their rulers, and so on; the class struggle might
perhaps become less violent, but it cannot disappear as long
as greed dominates the human heart. The idea of a classless
society in a so-called socialist world filled with the spirit of
greed is as illusory - and dangerous - as the idea of per¬
manent peace among greedy nations.

In the being mode, private having (private property) has
little affective importance, because I do not need to own
something in order to enjoy it, or even in order to use it. In
the being mode, more than one person - in fact rhillions of
people - can share in the enjoyment of the same object, since
none need - or want - to have it, as a condition of enjoying
it. This not only avoids strife; it creates one of the deepest
forms of human happiness: shared enjoyment. Nothing
unites people more (without restricting their individuality)
than sharing their admiration and love for a person; sharing
an idea, a piece of music, a painting, a symbol; sharing in a
ritual - and sharing sorrow. The experience of sharing
makes and keeps the relation between two individuals alive;
it is the basis of all great religious, political, and philosophi¬
cal movements. Of course, this holds true only as long as and
to the extent that the individuals genuinely love or admire.
When religious and political movements ossify, when
bureaucracy manages the people by means of .suggestions
and threats, the sharing becomes one of things rather than
one of experiences.

While nature has devised, as it were, the prototype - or
perhaps the symbol - of shared enjoyment in the sexual act,
empirically the sexual act is not necessarily an enjoyment
that is shared; the partners are frequently* so narcissistic,
self-involved, and possessive that one can speak only of sim¬
ultaneous, but not of shared pleasure.

In another respect, however, nature offers a less ambigu¬
ous symbol for the distinction between having and being.
The erection of the penis is entirely functional. The male
does not have an erection, like a property or a permanent
quality (although how many men wish to have one is any¬
body’s guess). The penis is in a state of erection, as long as

n6

the man is in a state of excitement, as long as he desires the
person who has aroused his excitement. If for one reason or
another something interferes with this excitement, the man
has nothing. And in contrast to practically all other kinds of
behaviour, the erection cannot be faked. George Groddek,
one of the most outstanding, although relatively little
known, psychoanalysts, .used to comment that a man, after
all, is a man for only a few minutes; most of the time he is a
little boy. Of course, Groddek did not mean that a man
becomes a little boy in his total being, but precisely in that
aspect which for many a man is the proof that he is a man.

(See the paper I wrote [1943] on‘Sex and Character’.)

Joy - Pleasure

Master Eckhart taught that aliveness is conducive to joy.
The modern reader is apt not to pay close attention to the
word ‘joy’ and to read it as if Eckhart had written ‘pleasure’.
Yet the distinction between joy and pleasure is crucial, par¬
ticularly so in reference to the distinction between the being
and the having modes. It is not easy to appreciate the
difference, since we live in a world of ‘joyless pleasures’.

What is pleasure? Even though the word is used in
different ways, considering its use in popular thought, it
seems best defined as the satisfaction of a desire that does not
require activity (in the sense of aliveness) to be satisfied.
Such pleasure can be of high intensity: the pleasure in
having social success, earning more money, winning a lot¬
tery; the conventional sexual pleasure; eating to one’s
‘heart’s content’; winning a race; the state of elation brought
about by drinking, trance, drugs; the pleasure in satisfying
one’s sadism, or one’s passion to kill or dismember what is
alive.

Of course, in order to become rich or famous, individuals
must be very active in the sense of busyness, but not in the
sense of the ‘birth within’. When they have achieved their
goal they may be ‘thrilled’, ‘intensely satisfied’, fee] they
have reached a ‘peak’. But what peak? Maybe a peak of ex¬
citement, of satisfaction, of a trancelike or an orgiastic state.
But they may have reached this state driven by passions that,

111

though human, are nevertheless pathological, inasmuch as
they do not lead to an intrinsically adequate solution of the
human condition. Such passions do not lead to greater
human growth and strength but, on the contrary, to human
crippling. The pleasures of the radical hedonists, the satis¬
faction of ever new cupidities, the pleasures of contemporary
society produce different degrees of excitements. But they
are not conducive to joy. In fact, the lack of joy makes it
necessary to seek ever new, ever more exciting pleasures.

In this respect, modern society is in the same position the
Hebrews were in three thousand years ago. Speaking to the
people of Israel about one of the worst of their sins, Moses
said: ‘You did not serve the Lord your God with joy and
gladness of heart, in the midst of the fullness of all things’
(Deuteronomy 28:47). Joy is the concomitant of productive
activity. It is not a ‘peak experience’, which culminates and
ends suddenly, but rather a plateau, a feeling state that ac¬
companies the productive expression of one’s essential
human faculties. Joy is not the ecstatic fire of the moment.
Joy is the glow that accompanies being.

Pleasure and thrill are conducive to sadness after the so-
called peak has been reached; for the thrill has been experi¬
enced, but the vessel has not grown. One’s inner powers have
not increased. One has made the attempt to break through
the boredom of unproductive activity and for a moment has
unified all one’s energies" except reason and love. One has
attempted to become superhuman, without beinghuman. One
seems to have succeeded to the moment of triumph, but the
triumph is followed by deep sadness: because nothing has
changed within oneself. The saying ‘After intercourse the
animal is sad’ [Tost coitum animal triste esf) expresses the
same phenomenon with regard to loveless sex, which is a
‘peak experience’ of intense excitation, hence thrilling and
plea.sureful, and necessarily followed by the disappointment
of its ending. Joy in sex is experienced only when physical
intimacy is at the same time the intimacy of loving.

As is to be expected, joy must play a central role in those
religious and philosophical systems that proclaim being as
the goal of life. Buddhism, while rejecting pleasure, con¬
ceives a state of Nirvana to be a state of joy, which is mani¬

fested in the reports and pictures of the Buddha’s death. (I
am indebted to the late D. T. Suzuki for pointing this out to
me in a famous picture of the Buddha’s death.)

The Old Testament and the later Jewish tradition, while
warning against the pleasures that spring from the satisfac-
tion of cupidity, see in joy the mood that accompanies being.
1 he Book of Psalms ends with the group of fifteen psalms
that are one great hymn of joy, and the dynamic psalms
begin in fear and sadness and end in joy and gladness.* The
Sabbath is the day of joy, and in the Messianic Time joy will
be the prevailing mood. The prophetic literature abounds
with the expression of joy in such passages as: ‘Then there
will the virgins rejoice in the dance, both young men and old
together: for I will turn their mourning into joy’ (Jeremiah
31:13) )and ‘With joy you will draw water’ (Isaiah 12:3). God
calls Jerusalem ‘the city of my joy’ (Jeremiah 49:25).

We find the same emphasis in the Talmud: ‘The joy of a
mitzvah [the fulfilment of a religious duty] is the only way to
get the holy spirit’ (Berakoth 31,a). Joy is considered so fun¬
damental that, according to Talmudic law, the mourning for
a close relative, whose death occurred less than a week ear¬
lier, must be interrupted by the joy of Sabbath.

^ The Hasidic movement, whose motto, ‘Serve God with
joy’, was a verse from the psalms, created a form of living in
which joy was one of the outstanding elements. Sadness and
depression were considered signs of spiritual error, if not out¬
right sin.

In , the Christian development even the name of the
gospels - Glad Tidings - shows the central place of gladness
and joy. In the New Testament, joy is the fruit of giving up
having, while sadness is the mood of the ohe who hangs on to
posses.sion.s. (See, for instance, Matthew 13 :44 and 19:22.) In
many of Jesus’ utterances joy is conceived as a concomitant
of living in the mode of being. In his last speech to the
Apostles, Jesus tells of joy in the final form : ‘These things I
have spoken to you, that my joy be in you, and that your joy
may be full’(John 15:11).

As indicated earlier, joy also plays a supreme role in

■" I have analysed these psalms in Tpu Shall Be as Gods.

Master Eckhart’s thinking. Here is one of the most beautiful
and poetic expressions of the idea of the creative power of
laughter and joy: ‘When God laughs at the soul and the soul
laughs back at God, the persons of the Trinity are beptten.
To speak in hyperbole, when the Father laughs to the son
and the son laughs back to the Father, that laughter gives
pleasure, that pleasure gives joy, that joy gives love and love
gives the persons [of the Trinity] of which the Holy Spirit is

one’(Blakney, p. 245). ,

Spinoza gives joy a supreme place in his anthropological-
ethical system. ‘Joy,’ he says, ‘is man’s passage from a lesser
to a greater perfection. Sorrow is man’s passage from a

greater to a less perfection’3, defs. 2,3).

Spinoza’s statements will be fully understood only if we
put them in the context of his whole system of thought. In
order not to decay, we must strive to approach the ‘model of
human nature’, that is, we must be optimally free, rational,
active. We must become what we can be. This is to be under¬
stood as the good that is potentially inherent in our nature.
Spinoza understands ‘good’ as ‘everything which we are cer¬
tain is a means by which we may approach nearer and nearer
to the model of human nature we have set before us’; he
understands ‘evil’ as ‘on the contrary ... everythirig which
we are certain hinders us from reaching that model’ {Ethics,
4, Preface). Joy is good; sorrow {tristitia, better translated as
‘sadness’, ‘gloom’) is bad. Joy is virtue; sadness is sin.

Joy, then, is what we experience in the process of growing

nearer to the goal of becoming ourself.

Sin and Forgiveness

In its classic concept in Jewish and Christian theological
thought, sin is essentially identical with disobedience
towards the will of God. This is quite apparent in the com¬
monly held source of the first sin, Adam’s disobedience. In
the Jewish tradition this act was not understood as ‘original’
sin that all of Adam’s descendants inherited, as in the Chris¬
tian tradition, but only as the first sin - not necessarily pre¬
sent in Adam’s descendants.

Yet the common element is the view that disobedience of

God’s commands is sin, whatever the commands are. This is
not surprising if we consider that the image of God in that
part of the biblical story is of a strict authority, patterned on
the role of an Oriental King of Kings. It is furthermore not
surprising if we consider that the church, almost from its
start, adjusted itself to a social order that, then in feudalism
as now in capitalism, required for its functioning strict obedi¬
ence of the individuals to the laws, those that .serve their true
interests as well as those that do not. How oppressive or how
liberal the laws and what the means for their enforcement
are make little difference with regard to the central issue:
the people must learn to fear authority, and not only in the
person of the law enforcement’ officers because they carry
weapons. This fear is not enough of a safeguard for the
proper functioning of the state; the citizen must internalise
this fear and give disobedience a moral and religious quality:
rin.

People respect the laws not only because they are afraid
but also because they feel guilty for their disobedience. This
feeling of guilt can be overcome by the forgiveness that only
the authority itself can grant. The conditions for such for¬
giveness are: the sinner repents, is punished, and by accept¬
ing punishment submits again. The sequence: sin
(disobedience) feeling of guilt -> new submission (pun¬
ishment) -> forgiveness, is a vicious circle, inasmuch as each
act of disobedience leads to increased obedience. Only a few
are not thus cowed, Prometheus is their hero. In spite of the
most cruel punishment Zeus afflicts him with, Prometheus
does not submit, nor does he feel guilty. He knew that taking
the fire away from the gods and giving it to human beings
was an act of compassion; he had been disobedient, but he
had mot sinned. He had, like many other loving heroes
(martyrs) of the human race, broken through the equation
between disobedience and sin.

Society, though, is not made up of heroes. As long as the
tables were set for only a minority, and the majority had to
serve the minority’s purposes and be satisfied with what was
left over, the sense that disobedience is sin had to be cul¬
tivated. Both state and church cultivated it, and both
worked together, because both had to protect their own hier-

■ '121 ; ■

120

archies. The state needed religion to have an ideology that
fused disobedience and sin; the church needed believers
whom the state had trained in the virtues of obedience. Both
used the institution of the family, whose function it was to
train the child in obedience from the first moment it showed
a will of its own (usually, at the latest with the beginning of
toilet training). The self-will of the child had to be broken in
order to prepare it for its proper functioning later on as a
citizen.

Sin in the conventional theological and secular sense is a
concept within the authoritarian structure, and this struc¬
ture belongs to the having mode of existence. Our human
centre does not lie in ourselves, but in the authority to which
we submit. We do not arrive at well-being by our own pro¬
ductive activity, but by passive obedience and the ensuing
approval by the authority. We have a leader (secular or
spiritual, king/queen or God) in whom we have faith; we
have security... as long as we are - nobody. That the sub¬
mission is not necessarily conscious as such, that it can be
mild or severe, that the psychic and social structure need not
be totally authoritarian, but may be only partially so, must
not blind us to the fact that we live in the mode of having to
the degree that we internalise the authoritarian structure of
our society,

As Alfons Auer has emphasised very succinctly, Thomas
Aquinas’ concept of authority, disobedience, and sin is a
humanistic one: i.e. sin is not disobedience of irrational
authority, but the violation of human well-being.* Thus
Aquinas can state: ‘God can never be insulted by us, except
we act against our own well-being’ (S.c. gent. 3,122). To ap¬
preciate this position, we must consider that, for Thomas, the
human good [honum humanum) is determined neither arbi¬
trarily by purely subjective desires, nor by instinctively given
desires (‘natural’, in the Stoic sense), nor by God’s arbitrary
will. It is determined by our rational understanding of

* Professor Auer’s yet unpublished paper on the autonomy of ethics
according to Thomas Aquinas (which I am indebted to him for letting
me read in manuscript) is very helpful to an understanding of Aquinas’
ethical concept. So also is his article on the question Ts sin an insult to
God?’ (See Bibliography,)

122

human nature and of the norms that, based on this nature,
are conducive to our optimum growth and well-being. (It
should be noted that as an obedient son of the church and a
supporter of the existing social order against the revolution¬
ary sects, Thomas Aquinas could not be a pure represen¬
tative of non-authoritarian ethic; his use of the word
disobedience for both kinds of disobedience served to ob¬
scure the intrinsic contradiction in his position.)

While sin as disobedience is part of the authoritarian and,
that is, the having structure, it has an entirely different
meaning in the non-authoritarian structure, which is rooted
in the being mode. This other meaning, too, is implied in the
biblical story of the Fall and can be understood by a
different interpretation of that story, God had put Man into
the Garden of Eden and warned him not to eat either from
the Tree of Life or from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and
Evil. Seeing that ‘it was not good that Man should be alone’,
God created Woman. Man and Woman should become one.
Both were naked, and ‘they were not ashamed’. This state- :
ment is usually interpreted in terras of conventional sexual i
mores, which assume that, naturally, a man and a woman
would be ashamed if their genitals were uncovered, But this
seems hardly all the text has to say, On a deeper level, this
statement could imply that although Man and Woman
faced each other totally, they did not, and they even could
not, feel ashamed, for they did not experience each other as
strangers, as separated individuals, but as‘one’.

This prehuman situation changes radically after the Fall,
when Man and Woman become fully human, i.e. endowed
with reason, with awareness of good and evil, with awareness
of each other as separate beings, with awareness that their
original oneness is broken and that they have become
strangers to one another. They are close to each other,-and
yet they feel separate and distant. They feel the deepest
shame there is: the shame of facing a fellow being ‘nakedly’
and simultaneously experiencing the mutual estrangement,
the unspeakable abyss that separates each from the other.
They made themselves aprons’, thus trying to avoid the full
human encounter, the nakedness in which they see each
other. But the shame, as well as the guilt, cannot be removed

12 '

by concealment. They did not reach out to each other in
love; perhaps they desired each other physically, but physi¬
cal union does not heal human estrangement. That they do
not love each other is indicated in their attitude towards each
other: Eve does not try to protect Adam, and Adam avoids
punishment by denouncing Eve as the culprit rather than
defending her.

What is the sin they have committed? To face each other
as separated, isolated, selfish human beings who cannot over¬
come their separation in the act of loving union. This sin is
rooted in our very human existence. Being deprived of the
original harmony with nature, characteristic of the animal
whose life is determined by built-in instincts, being endowed
with reason and self-awareness, we cannot help experiencing
our utter separateness from every other human being. In
Catholic theology this state of existence, complete^ sep¬
arateness and estrangement from each other, not abridged
by love, is the definition of ‘Hell’. It is unbearable for us. We
must overcome the torture of absolute separateness in some
way: by submission or by domination or by trying to silence
reason and awareness. Yet all these ways succeed only for the
moment, and block the road to a true solution. There is but
one way to save ourselves from this hell: to leave the prison
of our egocentricity, to reach out and to one ourselves with
the world. If egocentric separateness is the cardinal sin, then
the sin is atoned in the act of loving. The very word ‘atone¬
ment’ expresses this concept, for it etymologically derives
from ‘at-onement’, the Middle-English expression for union.
Since the sin of separateness is not an act of disobedience, it
does not need to be forgiven. But it does need to be healed;
and love, not acceptance of punishment, is the healing
factor. >

Rainer Funk has pointed out to me that the concept of sin
as disunion has been expressed by some of the church
fathers, who followed Jesus’ non-authoritarian concept of
sin, and suggests the following examples (taken from Henri
de Lubac): Origines says, ‘Where there are sins there is di¬
versity. But where virtue rules there is uniqueness, there is
oneness.’ Maximus Confessor , says that through Adam’s sin
the human race, ‘which should be a harmonious whole with¬

out conflict between mine and thine, was transformed into a
dust cloud of individuals’. Similar thoughts concerning the
destruction of the original_ unity in Adam can also be found
in the ideas of St Augustine and, as Professor Auer points
out, in the teaching of Thomas Aquinas. De Lubac says,
summing up: ‘As work of “restitution” {Wiederherstellung),
the fact of salvation appears necessary as the regaining of the
lost oneness, as the restitution of the supernatural oneness
with God and at the same time the oneness of men among
each other’ (my translation; see also ‘The Concept of Sin
and Repentance’ in You Shall Be as Gods for an examination
of the whole problem of sin).

_ To sum up, in the having mode, and thus the author¬
itarian structure, sin is disobedience and is overcome by re¬
pentance punishment renewed submission. In the being
mode, the non-authoritarian structure, sin is unresolved
estrangement, and it is overcome by the full unfolding of
reason and love, by at-onement. ' I

One can indeed interpret the story of the Fall in both I
ways, because the story itself is a blending of authoritarian
and liberating elements. But in themselves the concepts of
sin as, respectively, disobedience and alienation are dia¬
metrically opposed.

The Old Testament story of the Tower of Babel seems to
contain the same idea. The human race has reached here a
state of union, symbolised by the fact that all humanity has
one language. By their own ambition for power, by their
craving to have the great tower, the people destroy their
unity and are disunited. In a sense, the story of the Tower is
the second ‘Fall’, the sin of historical humanity. The story is
complicated by. God’s being afraid of the people’s unity and
the power following from it. ‘Behold, they are one people,
and they have all one language; and this is only the be¬
ginning of what they will do, and nothing that they propose
to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down
and there confuse their language, that they may not under¬
stand one another’s speech’ (Genesis 11:6-7). Of course, the
same difficulty already exists in the story of the Fall; there
God is afraid of the power that man and woman would exer-
cise if they ate of the fruit of both trees. '

Fear of Dying - Affirmation of Living

As stated earlier, the fear that one may lose one’s possessions
is an unavoidable consequence of a sense of security that is
based on what one has. I want to carry this thought a step
further.

It may be possible for us not to attach ourselves to
property and, hence, not fear losing it. But what about the
fear of losing life itself - the fear of dying? Is this a fear only
of older people or of the sick? Or is everybody afraid of
dying? Does the fact that we are bound to die permeate our
whole life? Does the fear of dying grow only more intense
and more conscious the closer we come to the limits of life by
age or sickness?

We have need of large systematic studies by psycho¬
analysts investigating this phenomenon from childhood to
old age and dealing with the unconscious as well as the con¬
scious manifestations of the fear of dying. These studies need
not be restricted to individual cases; they could examine
large groups, using existing methods of sociopsychoanalysis.
Since such studies do not now exist, we must draw tentative
conclusions from many scattered data. ■

Perhaps the most significant datum is the deeply engraved
desire for immortality that manifests itself in the many
rituals and beliefs that aim at preserving the human body.
On the other hand, the modern, specifically American denial
of death by the ‘beautification’ of the body speaks equally for
the repression of the fear of dying by merely camouflaging
death.

There is only one way - taught by the Buddha, by Jesus,
by the Stoics, by Master Eckhart - to truly overcome the
fear of dying, and that way is by not hanging onto life, not
experiencing life as a possession. The fear of dying is not
truly what it seems to be: the fear of stopping living. Death
does not concern us, Epicurus said, ‘since while we are, death
is not yet here; but when death is here we are no more’
(Diogenes Laertius). To be sure, there can be fear of
suffering and pain that may precede dying, but this fear is
different from that of dying. While the fear of dying may
thus seem irrational, this is not so if life is experienced as

To the extent that we live in ftio no • j
fa dying. No rational explanation vrill Kay this™‘

othc. that .ay kindle ^ o1

dymg should not begin as a preparation for death,! “h

crease the mode of beine An «:ninr.r,o L .

about life, not about del*. think

. on how to die is indeed the same as the

insemction on how to 1 ve. The more we rid ourselves of h
craving for posression m all its forms, particularly our e o

Here, Now-Past, Future

The mode of being exists only in the here and now (hie et

alE

In the having mode we are bound to what we have am-
a«d m he pa^f. money, land, fame, social status, knowl-
wn’ We think about the past, and we J

of the past. (1 his is the essence of sentimentality.) We are the
past; we can say: I am what I was.’

The jtiture i.s^ the anticipation of what will become the
pash ft IS experienced in the mode of having as is the past
Md IS c.xpre.«cd when one saysi ‘This person has a future,’
indicating that the individual will have many things even
though he or she docs not now have them. The Ford
comiiany’s advertising slogan, ‘There’s a Ford in your
future, stressed having in the future, just as in certain
_ *^f^®^'^’fi'-^h‘sdisciib.sioiUothefearofdyingassuchanclshan

mto discimon oJ an insoluble problem, the pain of suffering that our
death can inflict upon those who love us.

business transactions one buys or sells ‘commodity futures.
The fundamental experience of having is the same, whetlier
we deal with past or future. ^ ^

The present is the point where past and future join, a
frontier station in time, but not different in quality from the
two realms it connects.

Being is not necessarily outside of time, but time is not the
dimension that governs being. The painter has to wrestle
with colour, canvas, and brushes, the sculptor with stone and
chisel. Yet the creative act, their ‘vision’ of what they are
going to create, transcends time. It occurs in a fladi, or^ in
many flashes, but time is not experienced in the vision.^ The
same holds true for the thinkers. Writing down their ideas
occurs in time, but conceiving them is a creative event out-
•side of time. It is the same for every manifestation of being.
The experience of loving, of joy, of grasping truth does not
occur in time, but in the here and now. The here and now is
eternity, i.e. timelessness. But eternity is not, as popularly
misunderstood, indefinitely prolonged time.

One important qualification mu.st be made, though, re¬
garding relationship to the past. Our references here have
been to remembering the past, thinking, ruminating about
it; in this mode of ‘having’ the past, the past is dead. But one
can also bring the past to life. One can experience a situation
of the past with the same freshness as if it occurred in ^ the
here and now; that is, one can re-create the past, bring it to
life (resurrect the dead, symbolically speaking). To the
extent that one does so, the past cea.ses to be the past; it is the
here and now.

One can also experience the future as if it were the here
and now. This occurs when a future state is .so fully antici¬
pated in one’s own experience that it is only the future ‘ol)-
jectively’, i.e. in external fact, but not in the subjective
experience. This is the nature of genuine utopian thiiddng
(in contrast to utopian daydreaming); it is the basis of genu¬
ine faith, which does not need the external realization ‘in the
future’ in order to make the experience of it real.

The whole concept of past, pre.sent, and future, i.e. of
time, enters into our lives due to our bodily existence: the
limited duration of our life, the constant demand of our

128

body to be taken care of, the nature of the physical world
that we have to use m order to sustain ourselves. Indeed we
j cannot live in eternity; being mortal, we cannot ignore or
escape time. The rhythm of night and day, of sleep and
wakefulness, of growing and aging, the need to sustain our¬
selves by work and to defend ourselves, all these factors force
us to respect time if we want to live, and our bodies make us
want to live. But that we respect time i.s one thing; that we
submit to it is another. In the mode of being, we respect
time, but we do not submit to it. But this re.spect for drne
becomes submission when the having mode predominates.
In this mode not only things are things, but all that is alive
becomes a thing. In the mode of having, time becomes our
ruler. In the being mode, time is dethroned; it is no longer
the idol that rules our life. ^"

In industrial society time rules supreme. The current
mode of production demands that every action be exactly
‘timed’, that not only tlie endless assembly line conveyor belt
but, in a less crude sense, most of our activities be ruled by
time. In addition, time not only is time, ‘time is money’, The
machine must be used maximally; therefore the machine
force.s its own rhytlim upon the worker.

Via the machine, time has become our ruler. Only in our
free houns do we seem to have a certain choice, Yet we
usually oipnise our leisure as we organise our work. Or we
rebel against tyrant time by l)eing absolutely lazy. By not:
doing anything excejit disobeying time’s demands, we have
the illusion liiat we are free, when we are, in fact, only par¬
oled from our time-prison.

129

Religion, Character, and Society

This chapter deals with the thesis that social change inter-
acts with a change in the social character; that ‘religious'^
impulses contribute the energy necessary to move men and
women to accomplish drastic social change, and hence, that
a new society can be brought about only if a profound
change occurs in the human heart - if a new object of de¬
votion takes the place of the present one.*

The Foundations of Social Character

The starting point for these reflections is the statement that
the character structure of the average individual and the
socioeconomic structure of the society of which he or she is a
part are interdependent. I call the blending of the individual
psychical sphere and the socioeconomic structure social
character. (Much earlier, 1932 ,1 had used ‘libidinous struc¬
ture of society’ to express this phenomenon.) The socio¬
economic structure of a society moulds the social character of
its members so that they wish to do what they kae to do.
Simultaneously, the social character influences the socio¬
economic structure of society, acting either as cement to give
further stability to the social structure or, under special cir¬
cumstances, as dynamite that tends to break up the social
structure.

Social Character VIS-A-VIS Social Structure

The relation between social character and social structure is
never static, since both elements in this relationship are

*This chapter rests heavily upon my previous work particularly
Escape from Freedom {igrj.x) and P.ychomalysis arid Religiori (1950), in both
oj which are quoted the most important books in the rich literature on
this subject.

never-ending processes. A change in either factor means a
change in both. Many political revolutionaries believe that
one must first change the political and economic structure
radically, and that then, as a second and almost necessary
step, the human mind will also change: that the new society,
once established, will qiiasiautoraatically produce ^the new
human being. They do not see that the new elite, being moti¬
vated by the same character as the old one, will tend to re¬
create the conditions of the old society in the new sociopoliti¬
cal institutions the revolution has created; that the victory of
the revolution will be its defeat as a revolution - although
not as a historical phase that paved the way for the socio¬
economic development that was hobbled in its full develop¬
ment. The French and Russian revolutions are textbook
examples. It is notew^orthy that Lenin, who had not believed
that quality of character was important for a person’s revo¬
lutionary function, changed his view drastically in the last
year of his life when he sharply saw Stalin’s defects of
character and demanded, in his last will, that because of
these defects Stalin should not become his successor.

On the other side are those who claim that first the nature
of human beings must change - their consciousness, their
values, their character - and that only then can a truly
human society be built. The history of the human race proves
them wrong. Purely psychical change has always remained
in the private sphere and been restricted to small oases, or
has been completely ineffective when the preaching of
spiritual values was combined with the practice of the op¬
posite values.

Social Character and ^Religious^ Needs

The social character has a further and significant function
beyond that of serving the needs for a certain type of charac¬
ter and satisfying the individual’s character-conditioned
needs. Social character must fulfil any human being’s in¬
herent religious needs. To clarify, ‘religion’ as I use it here
does not refer to a system that has necessarily to do with a
concept of God or with idols or even to a system perceived as
religion, but to any group-shared system of thought and

action that offers the individual a frame of orientation and
an object of devotion. Indeed, in this broad sense of the word
rio culture of the past or present, and it seems no culture in

, the future, can be considered as not having religion.

^ This definition of religion’ does not tell us anything about
Its specific content. People may worship animals, trees, idols
of gold or stone, an invisible god, a saintly person, or a dia¬
bolic leader; they may worship their ancestors, their nation,
their class or party, money or success. Their religion may be
conducive to the development of destructiveness or of love,
of domination or of solidarity; it may further their power of
reason or paralyse it. They may be aware of their system as
being a religious one, different from those of the secular
realm, or they may think that they have no religion, and
interpret their devotion to certain allegedly secular aims,
such as power, money, or success, as nothing but their con¬
cern for the practical and the expedient. The question is not
one of religion or not? but of which kind of religion? -
whether it is one that furthers human development, the un¬
folding of specifically human powers, or one that paralyses
human growth.

A specific religion, provided it is effective in motivating
conduct, is not a sum total of doctrines and beliefs; it is
rooted in a specific character structure of the individual and,
inasmuch as it is the religion of a group, in the social charac¬
ter. Thus, our religious attitude may be considered an aspect
of our character structure, for we are what we are devoted
to, and what we are devoted to is what motivates our con¬
duct. Often, however, individuals are not even aware of the
real objects of their personal devotion and mistake their
‘official’ beliefs for their real, though religion. If, for
instance, a man worships power while professing a religion
of love, the religion of power is his secret religion, while his
so-called official religion, for example Christianity, is only
ideology.

The religious need is rooted in the basic conditions of
existence of the human Ours is a species by itself,
just as is the species chimpanzee or horse or swallow. Each
species can be and is defined by its specific physiological and
anatomical characteristics. There is general agreement on

the human species in biological terms, I have proposed that
the human species - i.e, human nature - can also be defined
psychic ally.In the biological evolution of the animal kingdom
the human species emerges when two trends in the animal
evolution meet. One trend is the ever-decreasing determina¬
tion of behaviour by instincts (‘instincts’ is used here not in
the dated sense of instinct as excluding learning but in the
sense of organic drives). Even taking into account the many
controversial views about the nature of instincts, it is generally
accepted that the higher an animal has risen in the stages of
evolution, the less is its behaviour determined by phylogenet-
ically programmed instincts.

The process of ever-decreasing determination of be¬
haviour by instincts can be plotted as a continuum, at the
zero end of which we will find the lowest forms of animal
evolution with the highest degree of instinctive deter¬
mination; this decreases along with animal evolution and
reaches a certain level with the mammals; it decreases
further in the development going up to the primates, and
even here we find a great gulf between monkeys and apes (as
R. M. Yerkes and A. V. Yerkes have shown in their classic
investigation, 1929). In the species Homo, instinctive deter¬
mination has reached its minimum.

The other trend to be found in animal evolution is the
growth of the brain, particularly of the neocortex. Here, too,
we can plot the evolution as a continuum: at one end, the
lowest animals, with the most primitive nervous structure
and a relatively small number of neurons; at the other,
Homo sapiens, with a larger and more complex brain struc¬
ture, especially a neocortex three times the size of that of our
primate ancestors, and a truly fantastic number of inter¬
neuronal connections.

Considering these data, the human species can be defined
as the primate who emerged at the point of evolution where
instinctive determination had reached a minimum and the
development of the brain a maximum. This combination of
minimal instinctive determination and maximal brain de¬
velopment had never occurred before in animal evolution
and constitutes, biologically speaking, a completely new
phenomenon.

136

Lacking the capacity to act by the command of instincts
while posse.ssing the capacity for self-awareness, reason,
and imagmation - new qualities that go beyond the capacity
for instrumental thinking of even the cleverest primes -
the human species needed,a /wme of orientation and an
object of devotion in order to survive.

Without a map of our natural and social world - a picture
of the world and of one’s place in it that is structured and has
inner, cohesion - human beings would be confused and
unable to act purposefully and consistently, for there would
be no way of orienting oneself, of finding a fixed point that
permits one to organise all the impressions that impinge
upon each individual.^ Our world makes sense to us, and we
feel certain about our ideas, through the consensus with those
around us. Even if the map is wrong, it fulfils its psycho¬
logical function. But the map has never been entirely wrong
- nor has it ever been entirely right. It has always been
enough of an approximation to the explanation of phenom- •
ena to serve the purpose of living. Only to the degree that
the practice of life is freed from its contradictions and its
irrationality can the map correspond to reality.

The impressive fact is that no culture has been found in
which such a frame of orientation does not exist. Neither has
any individual. Often individuals may disclaim having any
.such overall picture and believe that they respond to the
various phenomena and incidents of life from case to case, as
their judgment guides them. But it can be easily demon¬
strated that they simply take their own philosophy for
granted because to them it is only common sense, and tl^ey
are unaware that all their concepts rest upon a commonly
accepted frame of reference. When such persons are con¬
fronted with a fundamentally different total view of life,
they judge it as ‘crazy’ or ‘irrational’ or ‘childish’, while they
consider themselves as being only ‘logical’. The deep need
for a frame of reference is particularly evident in children.
At a certain age, children will often make up their own
frame of orientation in an ingenious way, using the few data
available to them.

But a map is not enough as a guide for action; we also
need a goal that tells us where to go. Animals have no such

problems. Their instincts provide them with a map as well as *
with goals. But lacking instinctive determination and having ■
a brain that permits us to think of many directions in which
we can go, we need an object of total devotion, a focal point
for all our strivings and the basis for all our effective ~ not i

only our proclaimed “ values. We need such an object of I

devotion in order to integrate our energies in one direction, i

to transcend our isolated existence, with all its doubts and ;

insecurities, and to answer our need for a meaning to life. !

Socioeconomic structure, character structure, and re- j

ligious structure are inseparable from each other. If the re- ;

ligious system does not correspond to the prevalent social i

character, if it conflicts with the social practice of life, it is ^

only an ideology. We have to look behind it for the real I

religious structure, even though we may not be conscious of
it as such - unless the human energies inherent in the re- J
ligious structure of character act as dynamite and tend to
undermine the given socioeconomic conditions. However, as I
there are always individual exceptions to the dominant
social character, there are also individual exceptions to the j
dominant religious character. They are often the leaders of |
religious revolutions and the founders of new religions. j

The ‘religious’ orientation, as the experiential core of all j
‘high’ religions, has been mostly perverted in the develop- |
ment of these religions. The way individuals consciously . ;
conceive of their personal orientation does not matter,'they ;
may be ‘religious’ without considering themselves to be so - |

or they may be non-religious, although considering them¬
selves Christian. We have no word to denote the experiential
content of religion, aside from its conceptual and insti- •-
tutional aspect. Hence, I use quotation marks to denote ‘re- j
ligious’ in the experiential^ iubjectm orientation, regardle.ss !
of the conceptual structure in which the person’s ‘religiosity’
is expressed.* i

\

■j-

htheWestern World Christian? !

According to the history books and the opinion of most |

* Nobody has dealt with the theme of atheistic religious experience i

raore profoundly and more boldly than has Ernst Bloch (197a). j

TOft i

people, Europe s conversion to Christianity took place first
within the Roman Empire under Constantine, followed by
the conversion of the heathen in Northern Europe by Bon-
ifacius, the ‘Apostle of the Germans’, and others in the eighth
cmtuvf. But was Europe ever truly Christianised?

In spite of the affirmative answer generally given to this
question, a closer analysis shows that Europe’s conversion to
Christianity was largely a sham; that at most one could speak
of a hmited conversion to Christianity from the twelfth to
the sixteenth centuries and that for the centuries before and
after this period the conversion was, for the most part, one to
an ideology^ and a more or less serious submission to the
church; It did not mean a change of heart, i.e. of the charac¬
ter structure, except for numerous genuinely Christian
movements.

Iri these four hundred years Europe had begun to be
Christianised. The church tried to enforce the application of
Christian principles on the handling of property, prices, and
support of the poor. Many partly heretic leaders and sects
arose, largely under the influence of mysticism that de¬
manded the return to the principles of Christ, including the
condemnation of property. Mysticism, culminating in
Master Eckhart, played a decisive role in this anti¬
authoritarian humanistic movement and, not accidentally,
women became prominent as mystical teachers and as stu¬
dents. Ideas of a world religion or of a simple undogmatic
Christianity were voiced by many Christian thinkers; even
the idea of the God of the Bible became questionable. The
theological and non-theological humanists of the Re¬
naissance, in their philosophy and in their Utopias, con¬
tinued the line of the thirteenth century, and indeed,
between the Late Middle Ages (tlie ‘Medieval Renaissance’)
and the Renaissance proper no sharp dividing line exists. To
show the spirit of the High and the Late Renaissance, I
quote Frederick B. Artz’.s summary picture:

In society, the great mediaeval thinkers held that all men are
equal in the sight of God and that even the humblest has an
infinite worth, In economics, they taught that work is a source of
dignity not of degradation, that no man should be used for an

1.^9

end independent of his welfare, and that justice should determine
wages and prices. In politics, they taught that the function of the
state is moral, that law and its administration should be imbued
with Christian ideas of justice, and that the relations of ruler and
ruled should always be founded on reciprocal obligation. The
state, property, and the family are all trusts from God to those
who control them, and they must be used to krther divine pur¬
poses. Finally, the mediaeval ideal included the strong belief
that all nations and peoples are part of one great community. As
Goethe said, ‘Above the nations is humanity,’ or as Edith Gavell
wrote in 1915 in the margin of her Imitation of Christ the night
before she was executed, ‘Patriotism is not enough.’

Indeed, had European history continued in the spirit of
the thirteenth century, had it developed the spirit of
scientific knowledge and individualism slowly and in an
evolutionary way, we might now have been in a fortunate
position. But reason began to deteriorate into manipulative
intelligence and individualism into selfishness. The short
period of Ghristianisation ended and Europe returned to its
original paganism.

However the concepts may differ, one belief defines any
branch of Christianity: the belief in Jesus Christ as the
Saviour who gave his life out of love for his fellow creatures.
He was the hero of love, a hero without power, who did not
use force, who did not want to rule, who did not want to
have anything. He was a hero of being, of giving, of sharing.
These qualities deeply appealed to the Roman poor as well
as to some of the rich, who choked on their selfishness. Jesus
appealed to the hearts of the people, even though from an
intellectual stand-point he was at best considered to be
naive. This belief in the hero of love won hundreds of thou¬
sands of adherents, many of whom changed their practice of
life, or became martyrs themselves.

The Christian hero was the martyr, for as in the Jewish
tradition, the highest achievement was to give one’s life for
God or for one’s fellow beings. The martyr is the exact op¬
posite of the pagan hero personified in the Greek and Ger¬
manic heroes. The heroes’ aim .was to conquer, to be
victorious, to destroy, to rob; their fulfilment of life was
pride, power, fame, and superior skill in killing (St Augustine

I compared Roman histoiy with that of a band of robbers).
: For the pagan hero a man’s worth lay in his prowess in at¬

taining and holding on to power, and he gladly died on the
: battlefield in the moment of victory. Homer’s Iliad is the

i poetically magnificent description of glorified conquerors

I and robbers. The martyr’s characteristics are being, giving,

' sharing; the heron’s, having, exploiting, forcing. (It should be

added tliat the formation of the pagan hero is connected
I with the patriarchal 'victory over mother-centred society,
j Men’s dominance of women is the first act of conquest and
I the first exploitative use of force; in all patriarchal societies
after the men’s victory, these principles have become the
I basis of men’s character.)

j Which of the two irreconcilably opposed models for our

I own development still prevails in Europe? If we look into

I ourselves, into the behaviour of almost all people, into our

I political leaders, it is undeniable that our model of what is

t good and valuable is the pagan hero. European-North Am-

: erican history, in spite of the conversion to the church, is a

! histoiy of conquest, pride, greed; our highest values are: to

I be stronger than others; to be victorious, to conquer others

! and exploit them. These values coincide with, our ideal of

j ‘manliness’: only the one who can fight and conquer is a

I man; anyone who is not strong in the use of force is weak, i.e.

‘unmanly’.

I It is not necessary to prove that the history of Europe is a

I history of conquest, exploitation, force, subjugation. Hardly
I any period is not characterised by these factors, no race or
j class exempted, often including genocide, as with the Am-
erican Indians, and even such religious enterprises as the
! Crusades are no exception, Was this behaviour only out-
I wardly economically or politically motivated, and were the
i slave traders, the rulers of India, the killers of Indians,
i the British who forced the Chinese to open their land to the
I import of opium, the instigators of two World Wars and

I those who prepare the next war, were all these Christians in

j their hearts? Or were perhaps only the leaders rapacious

j pagans while the great mass of the population remained

I Christians? If this were so, we might feel more cheerful,

i Unfortunately, it is not so. To be sure, the leaders were often

more rapacious than their followers because they had more
to gain^ but they could not have realised their plans were it '
not that the wish to conquer and to be victorious was and
still is part of the social charac ter.

One has only to recall the wild, crazy enthusiasm with
which people participated in the various wars of the past two i
centuries - the readiness of millions to risk national suicide ■
in order to protect the image of ‘the strongest power’, or of
‘honour’, or of profits. And for another example, consider the
frenzied nationalism of people watching the contemporary |
Olympic Games, which allegedly serve the cause of peace.
Indeed, the popularity of the Olympic Games is in itself a !•

symbolic expression of Western paganism. They celebrate ;

the pagan hero: the winner, the strongest, the most .self- I
assertive, while overlooking the dirty mixture of business |
and publicity that characterises the contemporary imitation ^

of the Greek Olympic Games. In a Christian culture the I

Passion Play would take the place of Olympic Games; yet |
the one famous Passion Play we have is the tourist sensation ;
in Oberammergau.

If all this is correct, why do not Europeans and Americans j
frankly abandon Christianity as not fitting our times? There !
are several reasons: for example, religious ideology is needed ^

in order to keep people from losing discipline and thus !

threatening social coherence. But there is a still more im- ■
portant reason: people who are firm believers in Christ as i
the great lover, the self-sacrificing God, can turn thi.s belief, |
in an alienated way, into the experience that it is Jesus who ;

loves for them, Jesus thus becomes an idol; the belief in him |.

becomes the substitute for one’s own act of loving. In a
simple, unconscious formula: ‘Christ does all the loving for I

us ; we can go on in the pattern of the Greek hero, yet we are !

saved because the alienated “faith” in Christ is a substitute
for the imitation of Christ.’ That Christian belief is also a I
cheap cover for one’s own rapacious attitude goes without ;
saying. Finally, I believe that human beings are so deeply
endowed with a need to love that acting as wolves causes us
necessarily to have a guilty conscience. Our professed belief
in love anaesthetises us to some degree against the pain of the j
unconscious feeling of guilt for being entirely without love. I

‘Industrial Religion’

The religious and philosophical development after the end
of the Middle Ages is too complex to be treated within the
present volume. It can be characterised by the struggle be¬
tween two principles: the Christian, spiritual tradition in
theological or philosophical forms and the pagan tradition
of idolatry and inhumanity that assumed many forms in the
development of what might be called the ‘religion of indus¬
trialism and the cybernetic era’.

Following the tradition of the Late Middle Ages, the
humanism of the Renaissance was the first great flowering of
the ‘religious’ spirit after the end of the Middle Ages. The
ideas of human dignity, of the unity of the human race, of
universal political and religious unity found in it an unen¬
cumbered expression. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century Enlightenment expressed another great flowering of
humanism. Carl Becker (1932) has shown to what extent the
Enlightenment philosophy expressed the ‘religious attitude’
that we find in the theologians of the thirteenth century: ‘If
we examine the foundation of this faith, we find that at
every turn the Vhilosophm betrayed their debt to medieval
thought without being aware of it.’ The French Revolution,
to which Enlightenment philosophy had given birth, was
more than a political revolution. As Tocqueville noted
(quoted by Becker), it was a ‘political revolution which func¬
tioned in the manner and which took on in some sense the
aspect of a religious revolution [emphasis added]. Like Is-
lamism and the Protestant revolt it overflowed the frontiers
of countries and nations and was extended by preaching and
propaganda.’

Radical humanism in the nineteenth and twentieth cen¬
turies is described later on, in ray discussion of the humanist
protest against the paganism of the industrial age. But to
provide a base for that di,scus.sion we must now look at the
new pagani.sm that has developed side by side with human¬
ism, threatening at the present moment of history to destroy
us.

The change that prepared the first basis for the develop¬
ment of the ‘industrial religion’ was the elimination, by

Luther, of the motherly element in the church. Although it
may appear an unnecessary detour, I must dwell on this
problem for a while, because it is important to our under¬
standing of the development of the new religion and the new
social character.

Societies have been organised according to two principles:
patricentric (or patriarchal) and matricentric (or matri¬
archal). The matricentric principle, as ]. J. Bachofen and L.
H, Morgan have shown for the first time, is centred in the
figure of the loving mother. The motherly principle is that of
unconditional love; the mother loves her children not be¬
cause they please her, but because they are her (or another
woman’s) children. For this reason the mother’s love cannot
be acquired by good behaviour, nor can it be lost by sinning,
Motherly love is mercy and compassion (in tiebrew rack-
amim, the root of which, is rechem^ the ‘womb’).

Fatherly love, on the contrary, is conditional; it depends
on the achievements and good behaviour of the child; father
loves that child most who is most like hifn, i.e. whom he
wishes to inherit his property. Father’s love can be lost, but it
can also be regained by repentance and renewed submission.
Father’s love is justice,

The two principles, the feminine-motherly and the mas¬
culine-fatherly, correspond not only to the presence of a
masculine and feminine side in any human being but
specifically to the need for mercy and justice in every man
and woman. The deepest yearning of human beings seems to
be a constellation in which the two poles (motherliness and
fatherliness, female and male, mercy and justice, feeling and
thought, nature and intellect) are united in a synthesis, in
which both sides of the polarity lo,se their mutual antagon¬
ism and, instead, colour each other, While such a syntiie.si.s
cannot be fully reached in a patriarchal society, it existed to
some extent in the Roman Church. The Virgin, the church
as the all-loving mother, the pope and the priest as motherly
figures represented motherly, unconditional, all-forgiving
love, side by side with the fatherly elements of a strict, patri¬
archal bureaucracy with the pope at the top ruling by power.

Corre.sponding to these motherly elements in the religious
system was the relationship towards nature in the process of

144

production: the work of the peasant as well as of the artisan
was not a hostile exploitative attack against nature. It was
co-operation with nature: not raping but transforming
nature according to its own laws.

_ Luther established a purely patriarchal form of Chris¬
tianity in Northern Europe that was based on the urban
middle cla.ss and the secular princes. The essence of this new
social character is submission under patriarchal authority,
with work as the only way to obtain love and approval.

Behind the^ Christian facade arose a new secret religion,
industrial religion’, that is rooted in the character structure
of modern .society, but is not recognised as ‘religion’, The
industrial religion is incompatible with genuine Christianity.
It reduces people to servants of the economy and of the
machinery that their own hands build.

The industrial religion had its basis in a new social charac¬
ter. It.s centre was fear of and submission to powerful male
authorities, cultivation of the sense of guilt for disobedience,
dissolution of the bonds of human solidarity by the sup¬
remacy of .self-interest and mutual antagonism. The ‘sacred’
in industrial religion was work, property, profit, power, even
though it furthered individualism and freedom within the
limits of its general principles. By transforming Christianity
into a strictly patriarchal religion it was still possible to
express the industrial religion in Christian terminology,

Fhe ‘Markbtino Character’ and ‘Cybernetic Religion’

The most important fact for understanding both the charac¬
ter and the .secret religion of contemporary human society is
the cliange in the social character from the earlier era of
capitalism to the .second part of the twentieth century. The
authnrilarian-obse,ssive-hoarding character that had begun
to develop in die .sixteenth century, and continued to be the
dominant character structure at least in the middle classes
until tlie end of the nineteenth century, was slowly blended
with or replaced by the marAcring character. (I de.scribed
the blends of various character orientations in Man for Him-
self.)

I have called this phenomenon the marketing character
because it is based on experiencing oneself as a commodity,
and one’s value not as ‘use value’ but as ‘exchange value’.
The living being becomes a commodity on the ‘personality
market’. The principle of evaluation is the same on both the
personality and the commodity markets: on the one, per¬
sonalities are offered for sale; on the other, commodities.
Value in both cases is their exchange value, for which ‘use
value’ is a necessary but not a sufficient condition.

Although the proportion of skill and human qualities on
the one hand and personality on the other hand as pre¬
requisites for success varies, the ‘personality factor’ always
plays a decisive role. Success depends largely on how well
they get their ‘personality’ across, how nice a ‘package’ they
are; whether they are ‘cheerful’, ‘sound’, ‘aggressive’, ‘re¬
liable’, ‘ambitious’; furthermore, what their family back¬
grounds are, what clubs they belong to, and whether they know
the ‘right’ people. The type of personality required depends
to some degree on the special field in which a person may
choose to work. A stockbroker, a salesperson, a secretary, a
railroad executive, a college profes.sor, or a hotel manager
must each offer a different kind of personality that, regard¬
less of their differences, must fulfil one condition: to be in
demand.

What shapes one’s attitude towards oneself i.s the fact that
skill and equipment for performing a given task are not
sufficient; one must win in competition with many others in
order to have success. If it were enough for the purpose of
making a living to rely on what one knows and what one can
do, one’s self-esteem would be in proportion to one’s capaci¬
ties, that is, to one’s use value. But since success depends
largely on how one sells one’s personality, one experiences
oneself as a commodity or, rather, .simultaneously as the
seller and the commodity to be sold. A person is not con¬
cerned with his or her life and happiness, but with becoming
saleable.

The aim of the marketing character is complete adap-
tatioiij so as to be desirable under all conditions of the per¬
sonality market. The marketing character personalities do
not even have egos (as people in the nineteenth century did)

146

to hold on to, that belong to them, that do not change For
they constantly change their egos, according to the pria-
ciple: I am as you de.sire me.’

Those witli the marketing character structure are without
goals, excy moving, doing things with the greatest
efficiency; if asked why they must move so fast, why things
have to be done with the greatest efficiency, they have no
genuine answer, but off er rationalisations, such as, ‘in order
to create more jobs, or in order to keep the company grow¬
ing. ffhey have little interest (at least consciously) in philo¬
sophical or religious questions, such as why one lives, and
why one is going in this direction rather than in another.
They have their big, ever-changing egos, but none has a self,
a core, a sense of identity. The ‘identity crisis’ of modern
society is actually the crisis produced by the fact that its
members have become selfless instrument.s, whose identity
rests upon their participation in the corporations (or other
giant bureaucracies). Where there is no authentic .self, there
can be no identity.

The marketing character neither loves nor hates. These
‘old-fa.shioned’ emotions do not fit into a character structure
that functions aImo.st entirely on the cerebral level and
avoids feelings, whether good or evil ones, because they
interfere with the marketing characters’ main purpose: sel¬
ling and exchanging - or to put it even more precisely, June--
tioning according to the logic of the ‘megamachine’ of which
they are a part, without asking any questions except how
well they function, as indicated by their advancement in the
bureaucracy.

Since the marketing characters have no deep attachment
to themselves or to other,s, they do not care, in any deep
sense of the word, not because they are so selfish but becau.se
their relations to others and to themselves are so thin. This
may also explain why they are not concerned with the
dangers of nuclear and ecological catastrophes, even though
they know all the data that point to these dangers. That they
are not concerned with the danger to their personal lives
mightstill be explained by the assumption that theyhavegreat
courage and unselfi.shness; but the lack of concern even for
their children and grandchildren excludes such explanation.

The lack of concern on all these levels is the result of the loss
of any emotional ties, even to those ‘nearest’ to them. The
fact is, nobody is close to the marketing characters; neither
are they close to themselves.

The puzzling question why contemporary human beings
love to buy and to consume, and yet are so little attached to
what they buy, finds its most significant answer in the
marketing character phenomenon. The marketing charac¬
ters’ lack of attachment also makes them indifferent to
things. What matters is perhaps the prestige or the comfort
that things give, but things per se have no substance. They
are utterly expendable, along with friends or lovers, who are
expendable, too, since no deeper tie exists to any of them.

The marketing-character goal, ‘proper functioning^ under
the given circumstances, makes them respond to the world
mainly cerebrally. Reason in the sense of understanding is an
exclusive quality of Homo sapiens; manipulative intelli¬
gence as a tool for the achievement of practical purposes is
common to animals and humans. Manipulative intelligence
without reason is dangerous because it makes people move in
directions that may be self-destructive from the standpoint
of reason. In fact, the more brilliant the uncontrolled ma¬
nipulative intelligence is, the more dangerous it is.

It was no less a scientist than Charles Darwin who demon¬
strated the consequences and the human tragedy of a purely
scientific, alienated intellect. He writes in his autobiography
that until his thirtieth year he had intensely enjoyed music
and poetry and pictures, but that for many years afterwards
he lost all his taste for these interests; ‘My mind seems to
have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out ■
of large collections of fact.... The loss of these tastes is a loss
of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect,
and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the
emotional part of our nature.’ (Quoted by E. F. Schuma¬
cher; q.v.)

The process Darwin describes here has continued since his
time at a rapid pace; the separation from reason and heart is
almost complete. It is of special interest that this deter¬
ioration of reason had not taken place in the majority of the
leading investigators in the most exacting and revolutionary

u8

i sciences (in theoretical physics, for example) and that they
were people who were deeply concerned with philosophical
and spiritual questions. I refer to such individuals as A, Ein-
; stein, N. Bohr, L. Szillard, W. Heisenberg, E. Schrodinger.

I The supremacy of cerebral, manipulative thinking goes

together with an atrophy of emotional life. Since it is not
. cultivated Or needed, but rather an impediment to optimal
functioning, emotional life has remained stunted and never
I matured beyond the level of a child’s. As a result the market-
I mg characters are peculiarly naive as far as emotional prob-
i lems are concerned. They may be attracted by ‘emotional
; pople, but because of their own naivete, they often cannot
judge whether such people are genuine or fakers. This may
explain why so many fakers can be successful in the spiritual
I and religious fields; it may also explain why politicians who

. [ portray strong emotions have a strong appeal for the

I marketing character - and why the marketing character

j cannot discriminate between a genuinely religious person

; and the public relations product who fakes strong religious

[ emotions.

I The term^ marketing character’ is by no means the only

j one to describe this type. It can also be described by using a

; Marxian term, the alienated character; persons of this

^ character are alienated from their work, from themselves,

from other human beings, and from nature. In psychiatric
I terms the marketing person could be called a schizoid
I character; but the term may be .slightly misleading, because
I a schizoid person living with other schizoid persons and per-
I forming well and being successful, lacks the feeling of un¬
easiness that the schizoid character has in a more ‘normal’
j environment.

; During the final revision of the manuscript of this book I

had ^ the opportunity to read Michael Maccoby’s forth-
j coming work The Gamesmen: The New Corporate Leaders

I in manascript. In this penetrating study Maccoby analyses

i the character structure of two hundred and fifty executives,

I managers, and engineers in two of the best-run large

i companies in the United States. Many of his findings

j confirm what I have described as features of the cybernetic
j person, particularly the predominance of the cerebral along

i lao

with the underdevelopment of the emotional sphere. Con¬
sidering that the executives and managers described by Mac-
coby are or will be among the leaders of American society,
the social importance of Maccoby’s findings is substantial.

The following data, drawn by Maccoby from his three to
twenty personal interviews with each member of the group
studied, give us a clear picture of this character type.*

Deep scientific interest in understanding, dynamic
sense of the work, animated o %

Centred, enlivening, craftsmanlike, but lacks
deeper scientific interest in the nature of things 22 %

The work itself stimulates interest, which is not
self-sustained 58%

Moderate productive, not centred. Interest in work
is essentially instrumental, to ensure security,
income 18%

Passive, unproductive, diffused 2%

Rejecting of work, rejects the real world 0%

100%

Two features are striking: (i) deep interest in understanding
(‘reason’) is absent, and (2) for the vast majority either the
stimulation of their work is not self-sustaining or the work is
essentially a means for ensuring economic security.

In complete contrast is the picture of what Maccoby calls
‘the love scale’:

Loving, affirmative, creatively stimulating 0%

Responsible, warm, affectionate, but not deeply
loving ^ 5%

Moderate interest in another person, with more
loving possibilities 40%

Conventional concern, decent, role oriented 41%

Passive, unloving, uninterested 13%

Rejecting of life, hardened heart 1%

100%

* Reprinted by permission. Cf- a parallel study by Ignacio Millan,
The Character of Mexican Execuim, to ht published soon.

150

No one m the study could be characterised as deeply loving,
ahhough 5 per cent show up as being ‘warm and
affectionate. All the rest are listed as having moderate
interest, or conventional concern, or as unloving, or outright
rejecting of life - indeed a striking picture of emotional
underdevelopment in contrast to the prominence of cer-
ebralism.

The cybernetic religion’ of the marketing character cor¬
responds to that total character structure. Hidden behind
the facade of agnosticism or Christianity is a thoroughly
pagan religion, although people are not conscious of it as
such. This pagan religion is difficult to describe, since it can
only be inferred from what people do (and do not do) and
not from their conscious thoughts about religion or dogmas
of a religious organisation. Most striking, at first glance, is
that Man has made himself into a god because he has ac¬
quired the technical capacity for a ‘second creation’ of the
world, replacing the first creation by the God of traditional
religion. We can also formulate: We have made the machine
into a god and have become godlike by serving the machine.
It matters little the formulation we choose; what matters is
that human beings, in the state of their greatest real im-
potence, imagine themselves in connection with science and
itchnique to he omnipotent.

The more we are caught in our isolation, in our lack of
emotional response to the world, and at the same time the
more unavoidable a catastrophic end seems to be, the more
malignant becomes the new religion. We cease to be the
masters of technique and become instead its slaves - and
technique, once a vital element of creation, shows its other
face as the goddess of destruction (like the Indian goddess
Kali), to which men and women are willing to sacrifice them¬
selves and their children. While consciously still hanging on to
the hope for a better future, cybernetic humanity represses
the fact that they have become worshippers of the goddess of
destruction.

This thesis has many kinds of proof, but none more com¬
pelling than these two: that the great (and even some smaller
powers continue to build nuclear weapons of ever-increasing
capacity for destruction and do not arrive at the one sane

solution - destruction of all nuclear weapons and the atomic f
energy plants that deliver the material for nuclear weapons -
and that virtually nothing is done to end the danger of eco¬
logical catastrophe. In short, nothing serious is being done to ;
plan for the survival of the human race. ;

The Humanist Protest :

The dehumanisation of the social character and the rise of
the industrial and cybernetic religions led to a protest move- f

ment, to the emergence of a new humanism, that has its t

roots in Christian and philosophical humanism from the
Late Middle Ages to the Age of Enlightenment. This protest -

found expression in theistic Christian as well as in pan- i

theistic or non-theistic philosophical formulations. It came
from two opposite sides: from the romantics, who were pol- I:
itically conservatives, arid from the Marxian and other t
socialists (and some anarchists). The right and the left were |
unanimous in their critique of the industrial system and the . i
damage it did to human beings. Catholic thinkers, such as |
Franz von Baader, and conservative political leaders, such as i'

Benjamin Disraeli, formulated the problem, sometimes in )

identical ways to those of Marx. ' j

The two sides differed in the ways they thought human
beings could be saved from the danger of being transformed |

into things. The romantics on the right believed that the |

only way was to stop the unhindered ‘progress’ of the indus- J

trial system and to return to previous forms of the social :■

order, though with some modifications. ’ *

The protest from the left may be called radical humanism, |
even though it was sometimes expressed in theistic and i

sometimes in non-theistic terras. The socialists believed that 1

the economic development could not be halted, that one ! '
could not return to a previous form of social order, and that . j
the only way to salvation lay in going forward and creating a j
new society that would free people from alienation, from sub- 1
mission to the machine, from the fate of being dehumanised. S :.
Socialism was the synthesis of medieval religious tradition : *

and the post-Renaissance spirit of scientific thinking and pol- v j

itical action. It was, like Buddhism, a ‘religious’ mass move- j

ment that, even though speaking in secular and atheistic

At least a brief commentary is necessary to explain my
charactensatton of Marxian thought, in view of its complete
petvmton by Soviet communism and reformist Western
m*”! ‘°/ ™terialism aimed at achieving wealth for
everybody As Hermann Cohen, Ernst Bloch, and a number
of other scholars have stated during the past decades, social¬
ism was the secular expression of prophetic Messianism.
f erhaps the brat way to demonsbate this is to quote from
the (Me of Maimonides his characterisation of the Messi-
anic Time:

The Sages and Prophets did not long for the days of the
Messiah that Israel might exercise dominion over the world, or
rule over the heathens, or be exalted by the nations, or that it
might eat and drink and rejoice. Their aspiration was that Israel
be free to devote itself to the Law and its wisdom, with no one to
oppress or disturb it, and thus be worthy of life in the world to
come.

In that era there will be neither famine nor war, neither jeal¬
ousy nor strife. Earthly goods* will be abundant, comforts within
the reach of all, The one preoccupation of the whole world will
be to know the Lord. Hence Israelites will be very wise, they will
know the things that are now concealed and will attain an
understanding of their creator to the utmost capacity of the
human mind, as it is written: For the earth shall be full of the
knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea (Isaiah 11:9).

In this description the goal of history is to enable human
beings to devote themselves entirely to the study of wisdom
and the knowledge of God; not power or luxury. The Messi¬
anic Time is one of universal peace, absence of envy, and
material abundance. This picture is very close to the concept
of the goal of life as Marx expressed it towards the end of the
third volume of his Cflj&frfl/:

* My translation from the Hebrew text, instead of‘blessings’ in the
Hershman translation, published by Yale University Press.

The realm of freedom does not commence until the point is
passed where labour under the compulsion of necessity and of
external utility is required. In the very nature of things it lies
beyond the sphere of material production in the strict meaning
of the term. Just as the savage must wrestle with nature, in order
to satisfy his wants, in order to maintain his life and reproduce
it, so civilised man has to do it, and he must do it in all forms of
society and under all possible modes of production. With his
development the realm of natural necessity expands, because his
wants increase; but at the same time the forces of production
increase, by which these wants are satisfied. The freedom in this
field cannot consist of anything else but of the fact that socialised
man, the associated producers, regulate their interchange with
nature rationally, bring it under their common control, instead
of being ruled by it as by some blind power; that they accomplish
their task with the least expenditure of energy and under con¬
ditions most adequate to their human nature and most worthy of
it. But it always remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins
that development of human power which is its own end, the true
: realm of freedom, which, however, can flourish only upon that
realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working day
is its fundamental premise. [Emphasis added.]

Marx, like Maimonides - and in contrast to Christian and
to other Jewish teachings of salvation ~ does not postulate a
final eschatological solution; the discrepancy between Man
and nature remains, but the realm of necessity is brought
under human control as much as possible: ‘But it always
remains a realm of necessity.’ The goal is Hhat development
of human power which is its own endythe true realm of
/reedom’ (emphasis added). Maimonides’ view that ‘the pre¬
occupation of the whole world will be to know the Lord’ is to
Marx the ‘development of human power . . . [as] its own
end’.

Having and being as two diflferent forms of human exist¬
ence are at the centre of Marx’s ideas for the emergence of
new Man, With these modes Marx proceeds from economic
to psychological and anthropological categories, which are,
as we have seen in our discussion of the Old and New Tes¬
taments and Eckhart, at the same time fundamental ‘re¬
ligious’ categories. Marx wrote: ‘Private property has made
us so stupid and partial that an object is only ours when we

have it, when it exists for us as capital or when it is directly
eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., in short, utilised in some
way.... Thus all the physical and intellectual senses have
been replaced by the simple alienation of all these senses; the
sense of having. The human being had to be reduced to'this
absolute poverty in order to be able to give birth to all his
inner wealth. (On the category of having see Hess in Ei-
nundzwanzig Bogen.f*

Marx’s concept of being and having is summarised in his
sentence. The less you are and the less you express your life
- the more you have and the greater is your alienated life.

.., Everything the economist takes away from you in the
way of life and humanity, he restores to you in the form of
money and wealth.’

The ‘sense of having’ about which Marx speaks here is
precisely the same as the ‘egoboundness’ of which Eckhart
speaks,the craving for things and for one’s ego.Marx refers to
the having mode of existence, not to possession as such, not to
unalienated private property as such. The goal is not luxury
and wealth, nor is it poverty; in fact, both luxury and poverty
are looked upon by Marx as vices. The goal is ‘to give birth’.

What is this act of giving birth? It is the active, un¬
alienated expression of our faculty towards the cor¬
responding objects. Marx continues: ‘AH his [Man’s] human
relations to the world - seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting,
touching, thinking, observing, feeling, desiring, acting,
loving - m short all the organs of his individuality... are in
their objective action [their action in relation to the object]
the appropriation of this object, the appropriation of human
reality.’ This is the form of appropriation in the mode of
being, not in the mode of having. Marx expressed this form
of non-alienated activity in the following passage:

Let us assume man to be man, and his relation to the world to
be a human one. Then love can only be exchanged for love, trust
for trust, etc. If you wish to enjoy art, you must be an artistically
cultivated person; if you wish to influence other people, you
must be a person who really has a stimulating and encouraging
effect upon others. Every one of your relations to man and to
* This and the following passages are from Marx’s Economic and Philo¬
sophical Manuscripts, translated in Marx’s Concept of Man.

nature must be a specific cfA:/)rewmn, corresponding to the object
of your will, of your real individual life. If you love without
evoking love in return, i.e. if you are not able, by the mani¬
festation of yourself as a loving person, to make yourself a bel¬
oved person, then your love is impotent and a misfortune.

But Marx’s ideas were soon perverted, perhaps because he
lived a hundred years too soon. Both he and Engels thought
that capitalism had already reached the end of its pos-
sibilitie.s and, hence, that the revolution was just around the
corner. But they were thoroughly mistaken, as Engels was to
state after Marx’s death. They had pronounced their new
teaching at the very height of capitalist development and
did not foresee that it would take more than a hundred years
for capitalism’s decline and the final crisis to begin. It was a
historical necessity that an anticapitalist idea, propagated at
the very peak of capitalism, had to be utterly transformed
into the capitalist spirit if it was to be successful. And this is
what actually happened.

Western social democrats and their bitter opponent.s, com¬
munists witliin and without the Soviet Union, transformed
^ocialism into a purely economic concept, the goal of which
Nvas maximum consumption, maximum use of machines.
Khrushchev, with his concept of ‘goulash’ communism, in his
simple and folksy manner let the truth out of the bag: Tlie
aim of socialism was to give the whole population the same
pleasure of consumption as capitalism gave only to a min¬
ority. Socialism and communism were built on the bourgeois
concept of materialism, Some phrases of Marx’s earlier writ¬
ing,s (which, on the whole, were denigrated as ‘idealistic’
errors of the ‘young’ Marx) were recited as ritualistically as
the words of the gospels are cited in the West.

That Marx lived at the height of capitalist development
had another consequence: as a child of his time Marx could
not help adopting attitudes and concepts current in bour¬
geois thought and practice, Thus, for instance, certain
authoritarian inclinations in his personality as well as in his
writings were moulded by the patriarchal bourgeois .spirit
rather than by the spirit of socialism. He followed the pat¬
tern of the classical economists in his construction ol

■ ■ .'.kG.'

scientific versus utopian’ socialism. Just as the economists
claimed that economics was following its own laws quite
independently of human will, Marx sensed the need to prove
that socialism would necessarily develop according to the
laws of economics. Consequently, he sometimes tended to
develop formulations that could be misunderstood as deter¬
ministic, not giving a sufficient role to human will and im¬
agination in the historical process. Such unintended
concessions to the spirit of capitalism facilitated the process
of perverting Marx’s system into one that was not fun¬
damentally diflferent from capitalism.

If Marx had pronounced his ideas today, at the beginning
- and rapidly increasing - decline of capitalism, his real
rnessage would have had a chance to be influential or even
victorious, provided one can make such a historical con¬
jecture. As it is, even the words ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’
are compromised. At any rate, every socialist or communist
party that could claim to represent Marxian thought would
have to be based on the conviction that the Soviet regimes
are^noit socialist systems in any sense, that socialism is incom¬
patible with a bureaucratic, thing-centred, consumption-
oriented social system, that it is incompatible with the
materialism and cerebralisation that characterise the Soviet,
like the capitalist, system.

The corruption of socialism explains the fact that genuine
radical humanist thoughts often come from groups and indi¬
viduals who were not identified with the ideas of Marx or
who were even opposed to them, sometimes after having
been active members of the communist movement,

While it is impossible to mention here all the radical
humanists of the post-Marxian period, some examples of
their thinking are given on the following pages. Though the
conceptualisations of these radical humanists differed
widely, and sometimes seem to contradict each other com¬
pletely, they all share the following ideas and attitudes:

® that production must serve the real needs of the people, not
the demands of the economic system;

® that a new relation must be establi-shed between people and
nature, one of co-operation not of exploitation;

® that mutual antagonism must be replaced by solidarity;

@ that the aim of all social arrangements must be human well¬
being and the prevention of ill-being;

. @ that not maximum consumption but sane consumption that
furthers well-being must be striven for;

® that the individual must be an activ'c, not a passive, par¬
ticipant in social life.*

Albert Schweitzer starts from the radical itremise of the.
imminent crisis of Western culture. ‘It is obvious to every¬
body,’ he states, ‘that we. are in a process of cultural self-
destruction. What is left is also not secure any more. It still
stands becau.se it was not expensed to tlie di'stnictive |)rcssurc
to which the rest ha.s already succumbed, But it too is built
on gravel [Gerbll]. 'rtie next land.slide \IkrgniLu:h] can tale
it along_The cultural capacity of modern Man is dim¬

inished because the circumstances which surraimd him dim¬
inish him and damage him jjsycliically.t
Characterising the industrial ireirig as 'unfree ..,
imconcentratcd ... incomplete ... in diinger of losing his
humanity’, he continues:

Because society with its developed organisation exercises a
hitherto unknown power over Man, Man’s ilependeney cin it has
grown to a degree tliat he almost has ceased lo live a mental
[ieistij^] existence of his own. ... Tl'iii.s we have entered a new
Middle Ages. By a general act of will ftaiedom of thouglit has
been put out of function, because many givt; up thinking as free
individuals, and an; guided liy the eolleetivc lu which they
belong, ,With the .sacrifice of indepiaidetice of tliouglu we
have - and how could it he otherwise lost faith it) truth. Our
intellectual-emotional life is di.sorgaiiised. The mmtirgmmuion
of OUT public (ijjairs cnlminales in the orjiiinmtion of llwu^ht-
lesmess [cmpha.sis added].

He,sees industrial society characteri.sed not only liy lack of

* The socialist bumartist.s’ vicw.s may be fbinul in E. Fromm, ed.,
Socialist Himanism.

f This and the Ibllowing Schweitzw' pass,ages arv my iranslafions ol
quotations from Dk Scliutd itr Philosnphii'm dm di-r h'ultiir^

first published in 1933, but .sketchwl from 1900 to 1917,

Tcft

freedom but Mso by ‘overeffort’ {Vberanstrengungj. ^for
two or three centuries many individuals have lived only as
working beings and not as human beings.’ The human sub¬
stance is stunted and in the upbringing of children by such
stunted parents, an essential factor for their human develop¬
ment is lacking. ‘Later on, himself subjected to over¬
occupation, the adult person succumbs more and more to the
need for superficial distraction.... Absolute passivity, diver¬
ting attention from and forgetting of oneself are a physical
need for him' (emphasis added). As a consequence Schweitzer
pleads for reduction of work and against overconsumption
and luxury.

Schweitzer, the Protestant theologian, insists, as does Eck-
hart, the Dominican monk, that Man’s task is not to retire
into an atmosphere of spiritual egotism, remote from the
affairs of the world, but to lead an active life in which one
tries to contribute to the .spiritual perfection of society. ‘If
among modern individuals there are so few whose human
and ethical sentiments are intact, not the least reason is the
fact that they sacrifice constantly their personal morality on
the altar of the fatherland, instead of being in constant living
interchange with the collective and of giving it the power
which drives the collective to its perfection' (emphasis
added).

He concludes that the present cultural and social structure
drives towards a catastrophe, from which only a new Re¬
naissance ‘much greater than the old one will arise’; that we
must renew ourselves in a new belief and attitude, unless we
want to perish. ‘Essential in this Renaissance will be the
principle of activity, which rational thinking gives into our
hands, the only rational and pragmatic principle of the his¬
torical development produced by Man.... I have confidence
in ray faith that this revolution will occur if we decide to
become thinking human beings' (emphasis added).

It is probably because Schweitzer was a theologian and is
best known, at least philosophically, for his concept of ‘rev-
erence for life’ as the basis of ethics that people have gen¬
erally ignored that he was one of the most radical critics of
industrial society, debunking its myth of progress and gen¬
eral happiness. He recognised the decay of human society

and the world through the practice of industrialised life; at
the beginning of this century he already saw the weakness
and dependency of the people, the destructive ellect of ob¬
sessional work, the need for less work and less consumption.
He postulated the necessity for a Renaissance of collective
life that would be organised by the spirit of solidarity and
reverence for life.

This presentation of Schweitzer’s thought should not be
concluded without pointing to the fact that Schweitzer, in
contrast h the metaphysical o})lin]ism of Cliristianity, was a
metaphysical sceptic. Tliis is one of the rertsons lie was
strongly attracted by Buddhist thought, in wliich life has no
meaning that is given and guaranteed by a su[)ieine being.
He came to this conclusion: ‘If one takes tlie world as it is, it
is impossible to endow it with meaning in wliicli the ainis
and goals of Man and of Mankind make sense.’ ,'^rhe only
meaningful way of life is activity hr the world ;jiot'activity
in general but the activity of giving and car'ing for fellow
creatures. Schweitzer gave this answer in bus writing and by
living it.

There is a remarkable kinsliij) in the ideas of tire Buddha,
Eckhart, Marx and Schweitzer: tlieii' radical demand for
giving up the having orientation; thrui' insistence on com¬
plete independence; their metaphysic:d scepticism^ their
godless religiosity,* and their dernami lor socitil activity in
the spirit of care and human solidarity. However', these
teachers are sometimes unconscioits of these elements. I’or
instance, Eckhart is usually unconscious of his non-theism;
Marx, of his religiosity, lire matter of interjrretation, es¬
pecially of Eckhart and Marx, is so complex that it is imj)(»s-
sible to give an adequate jn’esentution of the non-lheistic
religion of caring activism that make'; these teacliers the
founders of a new religiosity fitting the. necessitie.s of new
Man. In a sequel to this volume 1 hope to analyse tlu; ideas
of these teachers.

Even authors whom one cminot call radical humanists,
since they hardly transcend tire transpersonal, mechanistic

* In a teller to E, R, Jacobi, .Schweitzer wrote ihai the 'rdigioit oi
love can exist without a world-rulitig pcrsoiwlity’ {Dime a, No, r

[1967])*

160

attitude of our age (such as the authors of the two reports
commissioned by the Club of Rome), do not fail to see that a
radical inner human change is the only alternative to econ¬
omic catastrophe. Mesarovic and Pestel demand a ‘new
world consciousness ... a new ethic in the use of material
resources... a new attitude towards nature, based on har»
mony rather than on conquest... a sense of identification
with future generations.... For the first time in Man’s life
on earth, he is being asked to refrain from doing what he can
do; he is being asked to restrain his economic and tech¬
nological advancement, or at least to direct it differently
from before; he is being asked by all the future generations
of the earth to share his good fortune with the unfortunate -
not in a spirit of charity but in a spirit of necessity. He is
being asked to concentrate now on the organic growth of the
total world system, Gan he, in good conscience, say no?’
They conclude that without these fundamental human
changes, ‘Homo sapiens is as good as doomed.’

The study has some shortcomings -■ to me the most out¬
standing one being that it does not consider the political,
social, and psychological factors that stand in the way of any
change. To indicate the trend of necessary changes in gen¬
eral is useless until it is followed up by a serious attempt to
consider the real obstacles that impede all their suggestions.
(It is to be hoped that the Club of Rome comes to grips with
the problem of those social and political changes that are the
preconditions for attaining the general goals.) Neverthele.ss
the fact remains that these authors have attempted for
the firiit time to show the economic needs and resources of the
whole world, and that, as I wrote in the Introduction, for the
first time a demand is made for an ethical change, not as a
consequence of ethical beliefs but as the rational conse¬
quence of economic analysis.

Within the past few years, a considerable number of books
in the United States and in Germany have raised the same
demand: to subordinate economy to the needs of the people,
iir.st for our sheer survival, second for our well-being. (I
have read or examined about thirty-five such books, but the
number available is at least twice that.) Most of these
authors agree that material increase of consumption does not

161

necessarily mean increase in well-being; that a charac-
terological and spiritual change must go together with the
necessary social changes; that unless we stop wasting our
natural resources and destroying the ecological conditions
for human survival, catastrophe within a hundred years is
foreseeable. I mention here only a few of the outstanding
representatives of this new humanistic economy.

The economist E. F. Schumacher shows in his book Small
h Beautiful that our failures are the result of our successes,
and that our techniques must be subordinated to our real
human needs. ‘Economy as a content of life is a deadly
illness,’ he writes, ‘because infinite growth does not fit into a
finite world. That economy should not be the content of life
has been told to mankind by all its great teachers; that it
cannot be is evident today. If one wants to describe the
deadly illness in more detail, one can say that it is similar to
an addiction, like alcoholism or drug addiction. It does not
matter too much whether this addiction appears in a more
egotistical or more altruistic form, whether it seeks its satis¬
faction only in a crude materialistic way or also in an artLs-
lically, culturally, or scientifically refined way. Poison is
poison, even if wrapped in silver paper.... If spiritual cul¬
ture, the culture of the inner Man, is neglected, then
selfishness, like capitalism, fits this orientation better than a
system of love for one’s fellow beings.’

Schumacher has translated his principles by devising
miniraachines that are adapted to the needs of non-indus-
trialised countries. It is especially noteworthy that his books
are more popular every year - and not by a big advertising
campaign but by the word-of-mouth propaganda of his
readers.

Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich are two American authors
who.se thinking is similar to Schumacher’s, In their Po/m-
lation^ Resources, Environment: Issues in Human Ecology
they present the following conclusions about ‘the present
world situation’:

1. Considering present technology and patterns of be¬
haviour our planet is grossly overpopulated now.

2. The large absolute number of people and the rate of
162

population growth are major hindrances to solving
human problems.

3. The limits of human capability to produce food by
conventional means have very nearly been reached.
Problems of supply and distribution already have re¬
sulted in roughly half of humanity being under¬
nourished or malnourished. Some 10-20 million
people are starving to death annually now.

4. Attempts to increase food production further will tend
to accelerate the deterioration of our environment,
which in turn will eventually reduce the capacity of the
earth to produce food. It is not clear whether environ¬
mental decay has now gone so far as to be essentially
irreversible; it is possible that the capacity of the planet
to support human life has been permanently impaired.
Such technological ‘successes’ as automobiles, pesti¬
cides, and inorganic nitrogen fertilisers are major
causes of environmental deterioration.

5. There is reason to believe that population growth in¬
creases the probability of a lethal worldwide plague
and of a thermonuclear war. Either could provide an
undesirable ‘death rate solution’ to the population
problem; each is potentially capable of destroying civi¬
lisation and even of driving Homo sapiens to extinc¬
tion.

6. There is no technological panacea for the complex of
problems composing the population-food-environment
crisis, although technology properly applied in such
areas as pollution abatement, communications, and fer¬
tility control can provide massive assistance. The basic
solutions involve dramatic and rapid changes in human
attitudes, e.specially those relating to reproductive be¬
haviour, economic growth, technology, the environ¬
ment, and conflict resolution. [Emphasis added.]

E. Eppler’s oder Wende (End or change) is another
recent work that bears mention. Eppler’.s ideas are similar to
Schumacher’.s, though less radical, and his position. is
perhaps especially interesting because he is the leader of the
Social Democratic party in Baden-Wilrttemberg and a con-

^63

vinced Protestant. Two books I wrote are of the same orient-
atioiij The Sane Society and The Revolution of Hope.

Even among the Soviet bloc writers, where the idea of the
restriction of production has always been taboo, voices are
beginning to suggest that consideration be given to an econ¬
omy without growth, W. Harich, a dissident Marxist in the
German Democratic Republic, proposes a static, worldwide
economic balance, which alone can guarantee equality and
avert the danger of irreparable damage to the biosphere.
Also, in 1972 some of the most outstanding natural scientists,
economists, and geographers in the Soviet Union met to
discuss ‘Man and His Environment’. On their agenda were
the results of the Club of Rome studies, which they con¬
sidered in a sympathetic and respectful spirit, pointing to the
considerable merits of the studies, even though not agreeing
with them. (See ‘Technologic und Politik’ in the Biblio¬
graphy, for a report of this meeting.)

The most important contemporary anthropological and
historical expression of the humanism that is common to
these various attempts at humanist social reconstruction is to
be found ini. Mumford’s The Pentagon of Power and in all
his previous books,

VIII

Conditions for Human Change
and the Features of the New Man

Assuming the premise is right - that only a fundamental
change in human character from a preponderance of the
having mode to a predominantly being mode of existence
can save us from a psychologic and economic catastrophe -
the question arises: Is large-scale characterological change
possible, and if so, how can it be brought about?

I suggest that human character can change if these con¬
ditions exist:

1. We are suffering and are aware that we are.

2. We recognise the origin of our ill-being.

3. We recognise that there is a way of overcoming our ill-
being.

4. We accept that in order to overcome our ill-being we
must follow certain norms for living and change our
present practice of life.

These four points correspond to the Four Noble Truths
that form the basis of the Buddha’s teaching dealing with
the general condition of human existence, though not with
cases of human ill-being due to specific individual or social
circumstances.

The same principle of change that characterises the
methods of the Buddha also underlies Marx’s idea of sal¬
vation. In order to understand this it is necessary to be aware
that for Marx, as he himself said, communism was not a final
goal, but a step in the historical development that was to
liberate human beings from those socioeconomic and politi¬
cal conditions that make jreople inhuman - prisoners of
things, machines, and their own greed,

Marx’s first step was to show the working class of his time,
the most alienated and miserable class, tifar they suffered.
He tried to destroy the illusions that tended to cover the

165

workers’ awareness of their misery, His second step was to
show the causes of this suffering, which he points out are in
the nature of capitalism and the character of greed and avar¬
ice and dependence that the capitalistic system produces.
This analysis of the causes of the workers’ suffering (but not
only theirs) contributed the main thrust of Marx’s work, the
analysis of capitalistic economy.

His third step was to demonstrate that the suffering could
be removed if the conditions for suffering were removed. In
the fourth step he showed the new practice of life, the new
social system that would be free of the suffering that the old
system, of necessity, had to produce.

Freud’s method of healing was essentially similar. Patients
consulted Freud because they suffered and they were aware
that they suffered. But they were usually not aware what
they suffered from. The psychoanalyst’s usual first task is to
help patients give up their illusions about their suffering and
learn what their ill-being really consists of. The diagnosis of
the nature of individual or societal ill-being is a matter of
interpretation, and various interpreters can differ. The
patients’ own picture of what they suffer from is usually
the least reliable datum for a diagnosis. The essence of the
psychoanalytic process is to help make patients aware of the
of their ill-being.

As a consequence of such knowledge, patients can arrive
at the next step: the insight that their ill-being can be cured,
provided its causes are done away with. In Freud’s view this
meant to lift the repression of certain infantile events. Tradi¬
tional psychoanalysis seems essentially not to agree on the
need for the fourth point, however. Many psychoanalysts
seem to think that, by itself, insight into the repressed has a
curative effect. Indeed, this is often the case, especially when
the patient suffers from circumscribed symptoms, such as
hysterical or obsessional symptoms. But I do not believe any¬
thing lasting can be achieved by persons who suffer from a
general ill-being and for whom a change in character is
necessary, unless they change their practice of life in accord¬
ance with the change in character they want to achieve. Vov
instance, one can analyse the dependency of individuals until
doomsday, but all the insights gained will accomplish

i66

nothing while they stay in the same practical situations they
were living in before arriving at these insights. To give a
simple example: a woman whose suffering is rooted in her
dependency on her father, even though she has insight into
deeper causes of the dependency, will not really change
unless she changes her practice of life, for instance separates
from her father, does not accept his favours, takes the risk
and pain that these practical steps towards independence
imply. Insight separated from practice remains ineffective.

The New Man

The function of the new society is to encourage the
emergence of a new Man, beings whose character structure
will exhibit the following c|iialities:

• Willingness to give up all forms of having, in order to
frilly be.

Security, sense of identity, and confidence based on
faith in what one w, on one’s need for relatedness, interest,
love, solidarity with the world around one, instead of on
one’s desire to have, to possess, to control the world, and thus
become the slave of one’s possession.

• Acceptance of the fact that nobody and nothing outside
oneself give meaning to life, but that this radical inde- ■
pendence and no-thingness can become the condition for the
fullest activity devoted to caring and sharing.

«Being fully present where one is.

• Joy that comes from giving and sharing, not from, ^
hoarding and exploiting.

• Love and respect for life in all its manifestations, in the
knowledge that not things, power, all that is dead, but life
and everything that pertains to its growth are sacred.^

• Trying to reduce greed, hate, and illusions as much as
one is capable.

• Living without worshipping idols and without illusions,
because one has reached a state that does not require il¬
lusions.

• Developing one’s capacity for love, together with one’s
capacity for critical, unsentimental thought,

167

® Shedding one’s narcissism and accepting the tragic limi¬
tations inherent in human existence,
e Making the full growth of oneself and of one s fellow

beings the supreme goal of living.

® Knowing that to reach this goal, discipline and respect
for reality are necessary.

® Knowing, also, that no growth is healthy that does not
occur in a structure, but knowing, too, the difference be¬
tween structure as an attribute of life and ‘order as an attri¬
bute of no-life, of the dead.

9 Developing one’s imagination, not as an escape from
intolerable circumstances but as the anticipation of real pos¬
sibilities, as a means to do away with intolerable circum-
stances* ■

9 Not deceiving others, but also not being deceived by
others; one may be called innocent, but not naive.

9 Knowing oneself, not only the self one knows, but also
the self one does not know ~ even though one has a slum¬
bering knowledge of what one does not know.

9 Sensing one’s oneness with all life, hence giving up the
aim of conquering nature, .subduing it, exploiting it, raping
it, destroying it, but trying, rather, to understand and co¬
operate with nature. ^

9 Freedom that is not arbitrariness but the possibility to
be oneself, not as a bundle of greedy desires, but as a deli¬
cately balanced structure that at any moment is confronted

with the alternative of growth or decay, life or death.

• Knowing that evil and destructiveness are necessary

consequences of failure to grow.

• Knowing that only a few have reached perfection in all
these qualities, but being without the ambition to ‘reach the
goal’, in the knowledge that such ambition is only another
form of greed, of having.

• Happiness in the process of ever-growing aliveness, ! ,

whatever the furthest point is that fate permits one to reach,

for living as fully as one can is so satisfactory that the con¬
cern for what one might or might not attain has little chance
to develop.

To suggest what people living in contemporary cyberne¬
tic, bureaucratic industrialism - whether in its ‘capitalist’ or

i68

‘socialist’ version - could do to break through the having
form of existence and to increase the being sector is not
within the scope of this book. In fact, it would require a book
by hself, one that might appropriately be titled ‘The Art of
Being’. But many books have been published in recent years
about the road to well-being, some helpful, and many others
harmful by their fraudulence, exploiting the new market
that caters to people’s wish to escape their malaise. Some
valuable books that might be helpful to anyone with a
serious interest in the problem of achieving well-being are
listed in the Bibliography.

169

IX

Features of the New Society

A New Science of Man

The first requirement in the possible creation of the new
society is to be aware of the almost insurmountable
difficulties that such an attempt must face. The dim aware¬
ness of this difficulty is probably one of the main reasons that
so little effort is made to make the necessary changes. Many
think: ‘Why strive for the impossible? Let us rather act as if
the course we are steering will lead us to the place of safety
and happiness that our maps indicate,’ Those who uncon¬
sciously despair yet put on the mask of optimism are not
necessarily wise. But those who have not given up hope can
succeed only if they are hardheaded realists, shed all il¬
lusions, and fully appreciate the difficulties. This sobriety
marks the distinction between awake and dreaming ‘Uto¬
pians.’

To mention only a few of the difficulties the construction
of the new society has to solve:

• It would have to solve the problem of how to continue
the industrial mode of production without total cen¬
tralisation, i.e. without ending up in fascism of the old-
fashioned type or, more likely, technological ‘fascism with a
smiling face’.

• It would have to combine overall planning with a high
degree of decentralisation, giving up the ‘free-market econ¬
omy’, that has become largely a fiction.

• It would have to giye up the goal of unlimited growth
for selective growth, without running the risk of economic
disaster.

• It would have to create work conditions and a general
spirit in which not material gain but other, psychic satisfac¬
tions are effective motivations.

• It would have to further scientific progress and, at the

m

same time, prevent this progress from becoming a danger to
the human race by its practical application.

® It would have to create conditions under which people
experience well-being and joy, not the satisfaction of the
maximum-pleasure drive.

• It would have to give basic security to individuals with¬
out making them dependent on a bureaucracy to feed them.

^ «It must restore possibilities for ‘individual initiative’ in
living, rather than in business (where it hardly exists any
more anyway).

As in the development of technique some difficulties
seemed insurmountable, so the difficulties listed above seem
insurmountable now. But the difficulties of technique were
not insurmountable because a new science had been estab¬
lished that proclaimed the principle of observation and
knowledge of nature as conditions for controlling it (Francis
Bacon: Novum Organum, 1620 ). This new science of the
seventeenth century has attracted the most brilliant minds in
the industrialised countries up to this day, and it led to the
fulfilment of the technical Utopias the human mind had
been dreaming of.

But today, roughly three and a half centuries later, we
need an entirely different new science. We need a Human¬
istic Science of Man as the basis for the Applied Science and
Art of Social Reconstruction.

Technical Utopias - flying, for example - have been
achieved by the new science of nature. The human Utopia
of the Messianic Time - a united new humankind living in
solidarity and peace, free from economic determination and
from war and class struggle - can be achieved, provided we
spend the same energy, intelligence, and enthusiasm on the
realisation of the human Utopia as we have spent on the
realisation of our technical Utopias. One cannot construct
submarines by reading Jules Verne; one cannot construct a
humanist society by reading the prophets.

Whether such a change from the supremacy of natural
science to a new social science will take place, nobody can
tell. If it does, we might still have a chance for survival, but

whether it will depends on one factor: how many brilliant,
learned, disciplined, and caring men and women are at¬
tracted by the new challenge to the human mind, and by the
fact that this time the goal is not control over nature but
control over technique and over irrational social forces and
institutions that threaten the survival of Western society, if
not of the human race.

It is my conviction that our future depends on whether
given awareness of the present crisis, the best minds^ will
mobilise to devote themselves to the new humanistic science
of Man. For nothing short of their concerted effort will help
to solve the problems already mentioned here, and to

achieve the goals discussed below. , , .

Blueprints with such general aims as ‘socialisation of the
means of production’ have turned out to be socialist and
communist shibboleths mainly covering up the absence of
socialism. ‘Dictatorship of the proletariat’ or of an ‘intellec¬
tual elite’ is no less nebulous and misleading than the con¬
cept of the ‘free market economy’ or, for that matter, of the
‘free’ nations. Earlier socialists and comrnunists, from Marx
to Lenin, had no concrete plans for a socialist or communist
society; this was the great weakness of socialism.

New social forms that will be the basis of being will not
arise without many designs, models, studies, and experi¬
ments that begin to bridge the gap between what is necessary
and what is possible. This will eventually amount to large-
scale, long-run planning and to short-term proposals for first
steps, The problem is the will and the humanist spirit of
those who work on them; besides, when people can see a
vision and simultaneously recognise what can be done step
by step in a concrete way to achieve it, they will begin to feel
encouragement and enthusiasm instead of fright.

If the economic and political spheres of society are to be
subordinated to human development, the model of the new
society must he determined by the requirements of the un-
alienated, being-orientated individual. This meams that
human beingS: shall neither live in inhuman poverty - still
the main problem of the majority of people ~ nor be forced -
as are the affluent of the industrial world - to be a Homo
consumens by the inherent laws of capitalist production,

which demand continuous growth of production and, hence,
enforce growing consumption. If human beings are ever to
become free and to cease feeding industry by pathological
consumption, a radical change in the economic system is
necessary! we must put an end to the present situation where
a healthy economy is possible only at the price of unhealthy
human beings. The task is to construct a healthy economy
for healthy people.

The first crucial step towards this goal is that production
shall be directed for the sake of ‘sane consumption'.

The traditional formula ‘Production for use instead of for
profit' is insufficient because it does not qualify what kind of
use is referred to: healthy or pathological. At this point a
most difficult practical question arises; Who is to determine
which needs are healthy and which are pathogenic? Of one
thing we can be certain: to force citizen.? to consume what
the state decides is best - even if it is the best - is out of the
question. Bureaucratic control that would forcibly block
consumption would only make people all the more con¬
sumption hungry. Sane consumption can take place only if
an ever-increasing number of people want to change their
consumption patterns and their lifestyles. And this is possible
only if people are offered a type of consumption that is more
attractive than the one they are used to. This cannot happen
overnight or by decree, but will require a slow educational
process, and in this the government must play an important
role.

The function of the state is to establish norms for healthy
consumption, as against pathological and indifferent con¬
sumption. In principle, such norms can be established. The
U.S. Food and Drug Administration offers a good example;
it determines which foods and which drugs are harmful,
basing its determination on the expert opinion of scientists in
various fields, often after prolonged experimentation. In
similar fashion, the value of other commodities and services
can be determined by a panel of psychologists, anthro¬
pologists, sociologists, philosophers, theologians, and rep¬
resentatives of various social and consumer groups.

But the examination of what is life-furthering and what is
life-damaging requires a depth of research that is incom¬
es

parably greater than that necessary for resolving the prob¬
lems of the FDA, Basic research on the nature of needs that
has hardly been touched will have to be done by the nmv
science of Man. We will need to determine which needs orig¬
inate in our organism; which are the result of cultural pro¬
gress; which are expressions of the individual’s ^ growth;
which are synthetic, forced upon the individual by industry;
which ‘activate’ and which ‘passivate’; which are rooted in
pathology and which in psychical health.

In contrast to the existing FDA, the derisions of tlie new
humanist body of experts would not be implemented by force,
but would serve only as guidelines, to be .submitted to the
citizens for discussion. We have already become very much
aware of the problem of healthful and unhealthful food; the
results of the experts’ investigations will help to increase
society’s recognition of all other sane and pathological needs.
People would see tliat most consumpliun engenders pass¬
ivity; that the need for speed and newness, which can only
be satisfied by con.sumerism, reflects n;stle.ssnes.s, the inner
flight from oneself ; they would become aware thatjooking
for the next thing to do or the newest gadgth: to use is only a
means of protecting oneself from being close to oneself or to
another person.

The government can greatly facilitate this educational
process by subsidising the production of desirable com¬
modities and services, until these can be profitably iiroduced.
A large educational campaign in favour of .sane consumfition
would have to accompany these efforts. It is to he expected
that a concerted ejjort to stimulate the appetite for sane
consumption is likely to change the pattern of consumption.
Even if the brainwashing advertising methods tliat industry
now uses are avoided ~ and that is an essential condition - it
does not seem unreasonable to expect this effort to have an
effect that is not too far behind that of industrial propa¬
ganda.

A standard objection to the whole programme of .selective
consumption (and production) according to the principle of
‘What furthers well-being?’ is that in the free market econ¬
omy the consumers get precisely what they want, and hence
there is no need for ‘selective’ production. Thi.s argument i,s

. ■ m

based on the assumption that consumers want what is good
for them, which is, of course, blatantly untrue (in the case of
drugs, or perhaps even cigarettes, nobody would use this ar-
^ment). The important fact that the argument plainly
ignores is that the wishes of the consumer are manufactured
by the producer. In spite of competing brands, the overall
effect of advertising is to stimulate the craving for con¬
sumption. All firms help each other in this basic influence via
their advertising; the buyer exercises only secondarily the
doubtful privilege of choosing between several competing
brands. One of the standard examples offered by those who
argue that the consumers’ wishes are all-powerful is the fail¬
ure of the Ford company’s ‘Edsel’. But the Edsel’s lack of
success does not alter the fact that even the advertising
propaganda for it was propaganda to buy automobiles -
from which all brands profited, except the unfortunate
Edsel. Furthermore, industry influences taste by not pro¬
ducing commodities that would be more healthful to human
beings but kss profitable to industry.

Sane consumption is possible only if we can drastically
curb the right of the stockholders and management of big
enterprises to determine their production solely on the basis
of profit and expansion.

Such changes could be effected by law without altering
the constitutions of Western democracies (we already have
many laws that restrict property rights in the interest of the
public welfare). What matters is the power to direct product¬
ion, not ownership of capital. In the long run, the tastes of
the consumers will decide what is to be produced, once the
suggestive power of advertising is ended. Either the existing
enterprises will have to convert their facilities in order to
satisfy the new demands, or where that is not possible, the
government must spend the capital necessary for the pro¬
duction of new products and services that are wanted.

All these changes can only be made gradually, and with
the consent of the majority of the population. But they
amount to a new form of economic system, one that is as
different from present-day capitalism as it is from the Soviet
centralised state capitalism and from the Swedish total wel¬
fare bureaucracy.

175

Obviously, from the very beginning the big corporations
will use their treinendoiis power to try to fight such changes.
Only the citizens’ overwhelming desire for sane consumption
could break the "corporations’ resistance.

One effective way that citizens can demonstrate tlie power
of the consumer is to build a militant consumer movement
that will use the threat of ‘consumer strikes’ as a weapon.
Assume, for instance, that 20 per cent of the American car¬
consuming population were to decide not to buy jrrivate
automobiles any more, because they believed that, in com¬
parison with excellent public transportation, the [)iivate
automobile is economically wasteful, ecologically poisonous,
and psychologically damaging -■ a drug that creates an
artificial feeling of power, increases envy, and helps one to
run away from oneself. While only an economist could de¬
termine how great an economic threat it would be to the
automobile industry - and, of course, to the oil companies -
clearly if such a consumer strike were to happen, a national
economy centred around automolulc production would !)c
in serious trouble. Of course, nobody wants the American
economy to be in serious trouble, but such a threat, if it can
be made credible (stop using cars for one month, for in¬
stance), would give consumers a |)owerfiil leverage to induce
changes in the whole system of production.

The great advantages of consumer .strikes are that they do
not require government action, that they are dillkajlt to
combat (unless the government were to tak(i the .steqj of forc¬
ing citizens to buy what they do not want to buy), and that
there would be no need to wait for the accord of 51 |)er cent
of the citizens to bring enforcement liy goveruimmt
measures. For, indeed, a 20 jier cent ininoi ity could be ex¬
tremely effective in inducing change. Consumer stiikes
could cut through political lines and slf jgans; couservaiivc as
well as liberal and ‘left’ humani.st.s could {rarticipate, since
one motivation would unite them all: the desire for sane and
humane consumption. As the first step to calling off a con¬
sumer strike, the radical humanist consumer movement
leaders would negotiate with big industry (and with the
government) for the demanded changes. Their method

176

would be basically the same as that used in negotiations to
avert or end a workers’ strike.

The problem in all this lies in making the consumers
aware of (i) their partly unconscious protest against con¬
sumerism and (2) their potential power, once the humanist-
minded consumers are organised. Such a consumers’ move¬
ment would be a manifestation of genuine democracy: the
individuals would express themselves directly and try to
change the course of social development in an active and
non-alienated fashion. And all this would be based on per¬
sonal experience, not on political slogans.

But even an effective consumers’ movement will not
suffice as long as the power of the big corporations remains
as great as it is now. For even the remnant of democracy that
still exists is doomed to yield to technocratic fascism, to a
society of well-fed, unthinking robots - the very type of
society that was so much feared under the name of ‘commu¬
nism’ " unless the giant corporations’ big hold on the govern¬
ment (which becomes stronger daily) and on the population
(via thought control through brainwashing) is broken. The
United Statc.s has a tradition of curbing the power of giant
enterprises, expressed in its antitrust laws. A powerful public
sentiment could move that the spirit of these laws be applied
to the existing corporate superpowers, so that those super¬
powers would be broken up into smaller units.

To achieve a society based on being, all people must ac¬
tively participate in their economic function and as citizens.
Hence, our liberation from the having mode of existence is
possible only through the full realisation of industrial and
politicaiparticipaiory democracy.

This demand i.s shared by most radical humanists,

Industrial democracy imj)lies that each member of a large
industrial or other organisation plays an active role in the
life of the organisation; that each is fully informed and par¬
ticipates in decision-making, starting at the level of the indi¬
vidual’s own work process, health and safety measures (this
has already been successfully tried by a few Swedish and
American enterprise.s) and eventually participating in de¬
cision-making at higher, general policy levels of the enter-

177

prise. It is essential that the workers and employees represent
themselves, rather than be represented by trade union
officials outside the enterprise. Industrial democracy means
also that the enterprise is not only an economic and technical
institution, but a social institution in whose life and manner
of functioning every member becomes active and, therefore,

interested. . , . , , ,

The same principles apply to the implementation of pol^
itical democracy. Democracy can resist the authoritarian
threat if it is transformed from a passive spectator democ¬
racy’ into an active ‘participatory democracy’ - in which the
affairs of the community are as close and as important to the
individual citizens as their private affairs or, better, in^which
the well-being of the community becomes each citizens
private concern. By participating in the community, people
find life becomes more interesting and stimulating. Indeed, a
true political democracy can be defined as one in which life
is just that, interesting. By its very nature such participatory
democracy - in contrast to the ‘people’s democracies or
‘centralistic democracy’ - is unbureaucratic and creates a
climate that virtually excludes the emergence of dema¬
gogues. _

Devising the methods for participatory democracy is
probably far more difficult than was the elaboration of a
democratic constitution in the eighteenth century. Many
competent people will be required to make a gargantuan
effort to devise the new principles and the implementing
methods for building the participatory democracy. As just
one of many possible suggestions for achieving this end, I
should like to restate one I made more than twenty years ago
in The Sane Society: hundreds of thousands of face-to-

face; groups (of about five hundred members each) be
created, to constitute themselves permanent bodies of delib¬
eration and decision-making with regard to basic problems
in the fields of economies, foreign policy, health, education,
and the means to well-being. These groups would be given
all pertinent information (the nature of this information is
described later), would discuss this information (without the
presence of outside influences), and would vote on the issues
(and, given our current technological methods, all their

votes could be collected within a day). The totality of these
groups would form a ‘Lower House’, whose decisions, along
with those of other political organs, would have crucial
influence on legislation.

yhy make these elaborate plans,’ it will be asked, ‘when
opinion polls can perform the task of eliciting the whole
population’s opinion in an equally short time?’ This objec¬
tion tcuches upon one of the most problematical aspects of
the expression of opinion. What is the ‘opinion’ on which the
polls are based but the views a person has without the benefit
of adequate information, critical reflection, and discussion?
Furthermore, the people polled know that their ‘opinions’ do
not count and, thus, have no elTect, Such opinions only con¬
stitute people’s conscious ideas at a given moment; they tell
us nothing about the underlying trends that might lead to
the opposite opinions if circumstances were to change. Simi¬
larly, the voters in a political election know that once they
have voted for a candidate, they have no further real
influence on the course of events. In some respects, voting in
a political election is even worse than the opinion polls "be¬
cause of the dulling of thinking by semi-hypnotic techniques.
Elections become an exciting soap opera, with the hopes and
aspirations of the candidates - not political issues - at stake.
The voters can even participate in the drama by giving their
votes to the candidate with whom they side. Even though a
large part of the population refuses to make this gesture,
most people are fascinated by these modern Roman spec¬
tacles in which politicians, rather than gladiators, fight in
the arena.

At least two requirements are involved in the formation of
a genuine conviction: adequate information and the knowl¬
edge that one’s decision has an effect. Opinions formed by
the powerless onlooker do not express his or her conviction,
but are a game, analogous to exjrressing a preference for one
brand of cigarette over another. For these reasons the
opinions expressed in polls and in elections constitute the
worst, rather than the best, level of human judgment. This
fact is confirmed by just two examples of people’s best judg¬
ments, i.e. people’s decisions are far superior to the level of
their political decisions (a) in their private affairs (especially

in business/as Joseph Schumpeter has so clearly shown) and
(b) when they are members of juries. Juries are comprised of
average citizens^ who have to make decisions in cases that
are often very intricate and difficult to understand. But the
panel members get all pertinent information^ have the
chance for extended discussion, and know that their judg¬
ment decides the life and happiness of the persons they are
mandated to judge. The result is that, by and large, their
decisions show a great deal of insight and objectivity. In
contrast, uninformed, half-hypnotised, and powerless P^^ple
cannot express convictions. Without information, delib¬
eration, and the power to make one’s decision effective,
democratically expressed opinion is hardly more than the

applause at a sports event, ^ _ _

Active participation in political life requires maximum
decentralisation throughout industry and politics.^

Because of the immanent logic of existing capitalism, en¬
terprises and government grow ever larger and eventually
become giants that are administered centrally from the top
through a bureaucratic machine. One of the requisite of a
humanistic society is that this process of centralisation
should stop and large-scale decentralisation take place.
There are several reasons for this. If a society is transformed
into what Mumford has called a ‘niegamachine’ (that is, if
the whole of a society, including its people, is like a jarge,
centrally directed machine), fascism is almost unavoidable
in the long run because (a) people become sheep, lose their
faculty for critical thinking, feel powerless, are pa.ssive, and
necessarily long for a leader who ‘knows’ what to do - and
everything else they do not know, and (6) the megamachine
can be put in operation by anybody with access to it, simply
by pushing the proper buttons. The megaraachine, like
an automobile, essentially runs itself; i.e, the penson behind
the wheel of the car has only to push the right buttons,
manage the steering and the braking, and pay some atten¬
tion to a few other similarly simple details; what in a car or
other machine are its many wheels, in the megamachine are
the many levels of bureaucratic administration. Even a
person of mediocre intelligence and ability can easily run a
state once he or she is in the seat of power.

i8o

Government functions must not be delegated to states -
which are themselves huge conglomerates - but to relatively
small districts where people can still know and judge each
other and, hence, can actively participate in the admin¬
istration of their own community affairs. Decentralisation in
industry must^ give more power to small sections within a
given enterprise and break up the giant corporations into
small entities.

Active and responsible participation further requires that
humanistic management replace bureaucratic management

Most people still believe that every kind of large-scale ad¬
ministration must necessarily be ‘bureaucratic’, i.e. an alien¬
ated form of administration. And most people are unaware
of how deadening the bureaucratic spirit is and how it per¬
vades all spheres of life, even where it seems not to be
obvious, as in physician-patient and husband-wife relation¬
ships. The bureaucratic method can be defined as one that
(a) administers hurrian beings as if they were things and {b)
administers things in quantitative rather than qualitative
terms, in order to make quantification and control easier and
cheaper. The bureaucrats base their decisions on fix^d rules
arrived at from statistical data, rather than on resppnse to
the living, beings who stand before them; they decide issues
according to what is statistically most likely to be the case, at
the risk of hurting the 5 or lo per cent of those who dp not fit
into that pattern. Bureaucrats fear personal responsibility
and seek refuge behind their rules; their security and pride
lie in their loyalty to rules, not in their loyalty to the laws of
the human heart.

Eichmann was an extreme example of a bureaucrat. Eich-
mann did not send the hundreds of thousands of Jews to
their deaths because he hated them; he neither hated nor
loved anyone. Eichmann ‘did his duty’: he was dutiful when
he sent the Jews to their deaths; he was just as dutiful when
he was charged simply with expediting their emigration from
Germany. All that mattered to him was to obey the rules; he
felt guilty only when he had disobeyed them. He stated
(damaging his own case by this) that he felt guilty on only
two counts: for having played truant as a child, and for
having disobeyed orders to take shelter during an air raid.

181

This does not imply that there was not an element of sadism
in Eichmann and in many other bureaucrats, i.e. the satisfac¬
tion of controlling other living beings. But this sadistic streak
is only secondary to the primary elements in bureaucrats:
their lack of human response and their worship of rules.

I am not saying that all bureaucrats are Eichmanns. In the
first place, many human beings in bureaucratic positions are
not bureaucrats in a characterological sense. In the second
place, in many cases the bureaucratic attitude has not taken
over the whole person and killed his or her human side. Yet
there are many Eichmanns among the bureaucrats, and the
only difference is that they have not had to destroy thou¬
sands of people. But when the bureaucrat in a hospital
refuses to admit a critically sick person because the rules
require that the patient be sent by a physician, that bureau¬
crat acts no differently than Eichmann did. Neither do the
social workers who decide to let a client starve, rather tha.n
violate a certain rule in their bureaucratic code. This
bureaucratic attitude exists not only among administrators;
it lives among physicians, nurses, schoolteachers, professors-
as well as in many husbands in relation to their wives and in
many parents in relation to their children.

Once the living human being is reduced to a number, the
true bureaucrats can commit acts of utter cruelty, not be¬
cause they are driven by cruelty of a magnitude com¬
mensurate to their deeds, but because they feel no human
bond to their subjects. While less vile than pure sadists, the
bureaucrats are more dangerous, because in them there is
not even a conflict between conscience and duty: their con¬
science is doing their duty; human beings as objects of em¬
pathy and compassion do not exist for them.

The old-fashioned bureaucrat, who was prone to be
unfriendly, still exists in some old-established enterprises or
in such large organisations as welfare departments, hospitals,
and. prisons, in which a single bureaucrat has considerable,
power over poor or otherwise powerless people. The bureau¬
crats in modern industry are not,unfriendly and probably
have little of the sadistic streak, even though they may get
some pleasure from having power over people. But again, we
find in them that bureaucratic allegiance to a thing - in their

case, the system: they believe in it. The corporation is their
home, and its rules are sacred because the rules are ‘rational’.

But neither the old nor the new bureaucrats can coexist in
a system of participatory democracy, for the bureaucratic
spirit is incompatible with the spirit of active participation
by the individual. The new social scientists must devise plans
for new forms of non-bureaucratic large-scale administration
that is directed by response (that reflects ‘responsibility’) to
people and situations rather than by the mere application of
rules. Non-bureaucratic administration is possible provided
we take into account the potential spontaneity of response in
the administrator and do not make a fetish of economising.

Success in establishing a society of being depends on many
other measures. In offering the following suggestions, I make
no claim to originality; on the contrary. I am encouraged by
the fact that almost all of these suggestions have been made
in one form or another by humanist writers.*

• All brainwashing methods in industrial and political ad¬
vertising must be prohibited.

These brainwashing methods are dangerous not only be¬
cause they impel us to buy things that we neither need nor
want, but because they lead us to choose political represen¬
tatives we would neither need nor want if we were in full
control of our minds. But we are not in full control of our
minds because hypnoid methods are used to propagandise
us. To combat this ever-increasing danger, we must prohibit
the use of all hypnoid forms of propaganda, for commodities
as well as for politicians.

The hypnoid method,s’ used in advertising and political
propaganda are a serious danger to mental health, specific¬
ally to clear and critical thinking and emotional indepen¬
dence. I have no doubt that thorough studies will show that
the damage caused by drug addiction is only a fraction of the
damage done by our methods of brainwashing, from sublim-
al suggestions to such semi-hypnotic devices as constant rep¬
etition or the deflection of rational thought by the appeal to

* In order not to overburden this book I refrain from quoting the
large literature that contains similar proposals. Many titles may be
found in the Bibliography.

183

sexual lust (‘Fm Linda, fly me!’) The bombardment with
purely suggestive methods in advertising, and most of all in
television commercials, is stultifying. This assault on reason
and the sense of reality pursues the individual everywhere
and daily at any time: during many hours of watching tele¬
vision, or when driving on a highway, or in the political
propaganda of candidates, and so on. The particular effect
of these suggestive methods is that they create an atmos¬
phere of being half-awake, of believing and not believing, of
losing one’s sense of reality.

Stopping the poison of mass suggestion will have a with¬
drawal effect on consumers that will be little different from
the withdrawal symptoms drug addicts experience when they
stop taking drugs.

»The gap between the rich and the poor nations must be
closed.

There is little doubt that the continuation and further
deepening of that gap will lead to catastrophe. The poor
nations have ceased to accept the economic exploitation by
the industrial world as a God-given fact. Even though the
Soviet Union is still exploiting its own satellite states in the
same colonialist manner, it uses and reinforces the protest of
the colonial peoples as a political weapon against the West,
The increase in oil prices was the beginning - and a symbol -
of the colonial peoples’ demand to end the system that re¬
quires them to sell raw materials cheap and buy industrial
products dear. In the same way, the Vietnam war was a
symbol of the beginning of the end of the colonial peoples’
political and military domination by the West,

What will happen if nothing crucial is done to close the
gap? Either epidemics will spread into the fortress of the
white society or famines will drive the population of the poor
■ nations into such despair that they, perhaps with the
help of sympathisers from the industrial world, will commit
acts of destruction, even u.se small nuclear or biological
weapons, that will bring chaos within the white fortress.

This catastrophic possibility can be averted only if the
conditions of hunger, starvation, and sickness are brought
under control - and to do that, the help of the industrial

184

nations is vitally necessary. The methods for such help must
be free from all interests in profits and political advantages
on the side of the rich countries; this means also that they
must be free from the idea that the economic and political
principles of capitalism are to be transferred to Africa and
Asia. Obviously, the most efficient way for economic help to
be given is a matter for economic experts to determine.

But only those who can qualify as true experts can serve
this cause, individuals who have not only brilliant brains but
humane hearts that impel them to seek the optimal solution.
In order for these experts to be called in, and their recom¬
mendations to be followed, the having orientation must
greatly weaken, and a sense of solidarity, of caring (not of
pity) must emerge. Caring means caring not only for our
fellow beings on this earth but also for our descendants.
Indeed, nothing is more telling about our selfishness than
that we go on plundering the raw materials of the earth,
poisoning the earth, and preparing nuclear war. We hesitate
not at all at leaving our own descendants this plundered
earth as their heritage.

Will this inner transformation take place? No one knows.
But one thing the world should know is that without it the
clash between poor and rich nations will become urn
manageable.

• Many of the evils of present-day capitalist and commu¬
nist societies would disappear with the introduction of a
guaranteed yearly income.^

The core of this idea is that all persons, regardless of
whether they work or not, shall have the unconditional right
not to starve and not to be without shelter. They shall re¬
ceive not more than is basically required to sustain them¬
selves but neither shall they receive less. This right expresses
a new concept for today, though a very' old norm, demarided
by Ghristianity and practised in many ‘primitive* tribes,
that human beings have an unconditional right to live,
regardless of whether they do their‘duty to society^ It is a

* I proposed this in 1955 in The Sane Society, the same proposal was
made in a raid-igSos symposium (edited by A. Theobald; see Bibliog¬
raphy).

185

right we guarantee to our pets, but not to our fellow beings.

The realm of personal freedom would be tremendously
enlarged by such a law; no person who is economically de¬
pendent on another (e.g. on a parent, husband, boss) could
any longer be forced to submit to the blackmail of star¬
vation; gifted persons wanting to prepare for a different life
could do so provided they were willing to make the sacrifice
of living in a degree of poverty for a time. Modern welfare
states have accepted this principle - almost... which actu¬
ally means 'not really’. A bureaucracy still ‘administers’ the
people, .still controls and humiliates them. But a guaranteed
income would require no ‘proof of need for any person to
get a simple room and a minimum of food. Thus no bureauc¬
racy would be needed to administer a welfare programme
with its inherent w^aste and its violations of human dignity.

The guaranteed yearly income would ensure real free¬
dom and independence. For that reason, it is unacceptable to
any system based on exploitation and control, particularly
the various forms of dictatorship. It is characteristic of the
Soviet system that even suggestions for the simplest forms of
free goods (for example, free public transportation or free
milk) have been consistently rejected. Free medical service is
the exception, but only apparently so, since here the free
service is in response to a clear condition: one must be sick to
receive it.

Considering the present-day cost of running a large wel¬
fare bureaucracy, the cost of treating physical, especially
psychosomatic, illnesseis, criminality, and drug addiction (all
of .which are largely forms of protest against coercion and
boredom), it seems likely that the cost of providing any
person who wanted it with a guaranteed annual income
would be less than that of our present system of social wel¬
fare. The idea will appear unfeasible or dangerous to those
who believe that ‘people are basically lazy by nature’. This
cliche has no basis in fact, however; it is simply a slogan that
serves as a rationalisation for the resistance against sur¬
rendering the sense of power over those who are helpless.

* Women must be liberated from patriarchal domination

The freedom of women from patriarchal domination is a

m ■ ■

fundamental factor in the humanisation of society. The
domination of women by men began only about six thousand
years ago in various parts of the w^orld when surplus in agri-
culture permitted the hiring and exploitation of workers, the
organisation of armies, and the building of powerful city-
states.* Since then, not only Middle Eastern and European
societies but most of the world’s cultures have been
conquered by the ‘associated males’ who subdued the
women. This victory of the male over the female of the
human species was based on the men’s economic power and
the military machine they built.

The war between the sexes is as old as the war between the
classes, but its forms are more complicated, since men have
needed women not only as working beasts but also as
mothers, lovers, solace-givers. The forms of the war between
the sexes are often overt and brutal, more often hidden.
Women yielded to superior force, but fought back with their
own weapons, their chief one being ridicule of the men.

The subjugation of one half of the human race by the
other has done, and still does, immense harm to both sexes:
the men assume the characteristics of the victor, the women
those of the victim. No relation between a man and a
woman, even today, and even among those who consciously
protest against male supremacy, is free from the curse either,
among men, of feeling superior or, among women, of feeling
inferior. (Freud, the unquestioning believer in male
superiority, unfortunately assumed that women’s sense of
powerlessness was due to their alleged regret that they have
no penis, and that men were insecure because of their alleged
universal ‘fear of castration,’ What we are dealing with in
this phenomenon are symptoms of the war between the
sexes, not biological and anatomical differences as such.)

Many data show how much men’s control over women
resembles one group’s control over other powerless popu¬
lations. As an example, consider the similarity between the
picture of the blacks in the American South a hundred years
ago and that of women at that time, and even up to today.

* I have discussed the early ‘matriarchate’ and the literature related
to it m lhAmtomy of HumnDBstructw

187

Blacks and women were compared to children; they were
supposed to be emotional, naive, without a sense of reality,
so that they were not to be trusted with making decisions,
they were supposed to be irresponsible, but chaiming,
(Freud added to the catalogue that women had a less de¬
veloped conscience [superego] than men and were more nar¬
cissistic.)

The exercise of power over those who are weaker is the
essence of existing patriarchy, as it is the essence of the domi¬
nation of non-industrialised nations and of children and ado¬
lescents. The growing movement of women’s liberation is of
enormous significance because it is a threat to the principle
of power on which contemporary society (capitalist and
communist alike) lives - that is, if the women clearly mean
by liberation that they do not want to share the men s power
over other groups, such as the power over the colonial
peoples. If the movement for the liberation of women can
identify its own role and function as representative of‘anti¬
power’, women will have a decisive influence in the battle

for a new society. , t,

Basic liberating changes have already been made. Ferfiaps
a later historian will report that the most revolutionary
event in the twentieth century was the beginning of women s
liberation and the downfall of men’s supremacy. But the
fight for the liberation of women has only just begun, and
men’s resistance cannot be overestimated. Their whole re¬
lation to women (including their sexual relation) has been
based on their alleged superiority, and they have already
begun to feel quite uncomfortable and anxious vis-a-vis
those women who refuse to accept the myth of male
superiority.

Closely related to the women’s liberation movement is the
anti-authoritarian turn of the younger generations. This anti-
authoritarianism had its peak in the late sixties; now,
through a number of changes, many of the rebels against the
‘establishment’ have essentially become ‘good’ again. But the
starch has none the less been washed out of the old worship
of parental and other authorities, and it seems certain that
the old ‘awe’ of authority will not return.

Paralleling this emancipation from authority is the liber-

188

ation from guilt about sex: sex certainly seems to have
ceased being unspeakable and sinful. However people may
differ in their opinions regarding the relative merits of the
many facets of the sexual revolution, one thing is sure: sex
no longer frightens people; it can no longer be used to de¬
velop a sense of guilt, and thereby to force submission.

6 A Supreme Cultural Council, charged with the task of
advising the government, the politicians, and the citizens in
all matters in which knowledge is necessary, should be estab¬
lished.

The cultural council members would be representative of
the intellectual and artistic elite of the country, men and
women whose integrity was beyond doubt. They would de¬
termine the composition of the new, expanded form of the
FDA and would select the people to be responsible for dis¬
seminating information.

There is a substantial consensus on who the outstanding
representatives of various branches of culture are, and I be¬
lieve it would be possible to find the right members for such
a council. It is of decisive importance, of course, that this
council should also represent those who are opposed to es¬
tablished views: for instance, the ‘radicals’ and ‘revisionists’
in economics, history, and sociology. The difficulty is not in
finding the council members but in choosing them, for they
cannot be elected by popular vote, nor should they be ap¬
pointed by the government. Yet other ways of selecting them
may be found. For instance, start with a nucleus of three or
four persons and gradually enlarge the group to its full size
of, say, fifty to a hundred persons. This cultural council
should be amply financed so that it would be able to com¬
mission special studies of various problems.

• A system of effective dissemination of effective infor¬
mation must also be established.

Information is a crucial element in the formation of an
effective democracy. Withholding information or falsifying
it in the alleged interests of ‘national security’ must be
ended. But even without such illegitimate withholding of
information, the problem remains that at present the

,'189 ,/ . .

amount of real and necessary information given to the aver¬
age citizen is almost zero. And this holds true not only for the
average citizen. As has been shown abundantly, most elected
representatives, members of government, leaders of the de¬
fence forces, and business leaders are badly informed and to a
large extent misinformed by the falsehoods that various
government agencies spread, and the news media repeat.
Unfortunately, most of these same people, in turn, have at
best a purely manipulative intelligence. They have little ca¬
pacity to understand the forces operating beneath the sur¬
face and, hence, to make sound judgments about future
developments, not to speak of their selfishness and dis¬
honesty, of which we have heard enough. But even to be an
honest and intelligent bureaucrat is not enough to solve the
problems of a world facing catastrophe.

With the exception of a few ‘great’ newspapers, even the
factual information on political, economic, and social data is
extremely limited. The so-called great newspapers inform
better, but they also misinform better: by not publishing all
the news impartially; by slanting headlines, in addition to
writing headlines that often do not conform with their ac¬
companying text; by being partisan in their editorials, writ¬
ten under the cover of seemingly reasonable and moralising
language. In fact, the newspapers, the magazines, televi.sion,
and radio produce a commodity: news, from the raw
material of events. Only news is saleable, and the news
media determine which events are news, which are not. At
the very best, information is ready-made, concerns only the
surface of events, and barely gives the citizens an oppor¬
tunity to penetrate through the surface and recognise the
deeper causes of the events. As long as the sale of news is a
business, newspapers and magazines can hardly be prevented
from printing what sells (in various degree.s of unscrupu-
lousiiess) their publications and does not antagoni.se the ad¬
vertisers.

The information problem must be solved in a different way
if informed opinion and decision are to be possible. As an
example of such a way I mention only one: that one of the
first and most important functions of the Supreme Cultural

IQO

Council would be to gather and disseminate all the infor¬
mation that would serve the needs of the whole population
and, particularly, would serve as the basis for discussion
among the face-to-face groups in our participatory democ¬
racy. This information should contain basic facts and basic
alternatives in all areas in which political decisions take
place. It is of special importance that in case of disagreement
the minority opinion and the majority opinion would be
published, and that this information would be made avail¬
able to every citizen and particularly to the face-to-face
groups. The Supreme Cultural Council would be re¬
sponsible for .supervising the work of this new body of news
reporters, and, of course, radio and televi.sion would have an
important role in disseminating this kind of information.

® Scientific research must be separated from application i
in industry and defence.

While it would be hobbling of human development if one
set any limits to the demand for knowledge, it would be
extremely dangerous if practical use were made of all the
results of scientific thinking. As has been emphasised by
many observer.s, certain discoveries in genetics, in brain sur¬
gery, in psychodrugs, and in many other areas can and will
be misused to the gu’eat damage of Man. This is unavoidable
as long as industrial and military interests are free to make
use of all new theoretical discoveries as they see fit. Profit
and military expediency must cease to determine the aj^pli-
cation of scientific research. This will require a control
board, whose permi.ssion would be necessary for the practical
application of any new theoretical discovery. Needless to
.say, such a control lioarcl must lie - legally and psycho¬
logically - comiiietely independent of industry, the govern¬
ment, and the military. The Supreme Cultural Council
would have the authority to appoint and supervise this con¬
trol board.

• While all the suggestions made in the foregoing pages
will be difficult enough to realise, our difficulties become
almost insurmountable with the addition of another neces¬
sary condition of a new i^ockty: atomic disarnianumt.

One of the sick elements in our economy is that it needs a

191

large armament industry. Even today, the United States, the
richest country in the world, must curtail its expenses for
health, welfare, and education in order to carry the load of
its defence budget. The cost of social experimentation
cannot possibly be borne by a state that is making itself poor
by the production of hardware that is useful only as a means
of suicide. Furthermore, the spirit of individualism and ac¬
tivity cannot live in an atmosphere where the military
bureaucracy, gaining in power every day, continues to
further fear and subordination.

The New Society: Is There a Reasonable Chance?

Considering the power of the corporations, the apathy and
^ powerlessness of the large mass of the population, the inad¬
equacy of political leaders in almost all countries, the threat
of nuclear war, the ecological dangers, not to speak of such
' phenomena as weather changes that alone could produce
famines in large parts of the world, is there a reasonable
chance for salvation? From the standpoint of a business deal,
there is no such chance; no reasonable human beings would
bet their fortunes when the odds represent only a 2 per cent
chance of winning, or make a large investment of capital in a
busine.ss venture with the same poor chance of gain. But
when it is a matter of life and death, ‘reasonable chance
must be translated into ‘real possibilityV however small it
maybe.

Life is neither a game of chance nor a business deal, and
we must seek elsewhere for an appreciation of the^real pos¬
sibilities for salvation: in the healing art of medicine, for
example. If a sick person has even the barest chance for
survival, no responsible phy.sician will say, ‘Let’s give up the
effort,’ or will use only palliatives. On the contrary, every¬
thing conceivable is done to save the sick person’s life. Cer¬
tainly, a sick society cannot expect anything less.

Judging present-day society’s chances for salvation from
the standpoint of betting or business rather than from the
standpoint of life is characteristic of the spirit of a business
society. There is little wisdom in the currently fashionable
technocratic view that there is nothing seriously wrong in

keeping ourselves busy with work or fun, in not feeling, and
that even if there is, perhaps technocratic fascism may not be
so bad, after all. But this is wishful thinking. Technocratic
fascism must necessarily lead to catastrophe. Dehumanised
Man will become so rnad that he will not be able to sustain
a viable society in the long run, and in the short run will not
be able to refrain from the suicidal use of nuclear or bio¬
logical weapons.

Yet there are a few factors that can give us some en¬
couragement. The first is that a growing number of people
now recognise the truth that Mesarovic and Pestel, Ehrlich
and Ehrlich, and others have stated: that on purely econ¬
omic grounds a new ethic, a new attitude towards nature,
human solidarity, and co-operation are necessary if the
Western world is not to be wiped out. This appeal to reason,
even aside from any emotional and ethical considerations,
may mobilise the minds of not a few people. It should not be
taken lightly, even though, historically, nations have again
and again acted against their vital interests and even against
the drive for survival. They could do so because the people
were persuaded by their leaders that the choice between ‘to
be or not to lie’ did not confront them. Had they recognised
the truth, however, the normal neurophysiological reaction
would have taken place: their awareness of vital threats
would have mo])ilised appropriate defence action.

Another hopeful sign is the increasing display of dissat¬
isfaction with our pre.sent .social system. A growing number
of people feel la malaise du sikie: they sense their de-
pre.ssion; they are conscious of it, in spite of all kinds of
efforts to repres.s it. They feel the unhappiness of their iso¬
lation and the emptiness of their ‘togetherness’; they feel
their impotence, the meanir)glessne.ss of their lives. Many
feel all this very clearly and consciously: others feel it less
clearly, but are fully aware of it when someone else puts it
into words.

So far in world history a life of empty pleasure was pos¬
sible for only a .small elite, and they remained essentially
.sane because they knew they had power and that they had to
think and to act in order not to lose their power. Today, the
empty life of consumption is that of the whole middle class,

193

192

m

which economically and politically has no power and little
personal responsibility. The major part of the Western
world knows the benefits of the consumer type of happiness,
and growing numbers of those who benefit from it are
finding it wanting. They are beginning to^ dkover that
having much does not create well-being: traditional ethica
teaching has been put to the test - and is being confirmed

^Onfy in those who live without the benefits of middle-
class luxury does the old illusion remain untouched. in the
lower middle classes in the West and among the vast ma¬
jority in the ‘socialist’ countries. Indeed, the bourgeois hope
for ‘happiness through consumption’ is nowhere more alive
than in the countries that have not yet fulfilled the bourgeois

dream, -i- ■ r

One of the gravest objections to the possibilities of over¬
coming greed and envy, namely that their strength is^ in¬
herent in human nature, loses a good deal of its weight
upon further examination. Greed and envy are so strong
not because of their inherent intensity but because of the
difficulty in resisting the public pressure to be a wolf with
the wolves. Change the social climate, the values that are
either approved or disapproved, and the change from
selfishness to altruism will lose most of its difficulty.

Thus we arrive again at the premise that the being
orientation is a strong potential in human nature. Only a
minority is governed by the having mode, while another .
small minority is governed by the being mode. Either can
become dominant, and which one does depends on the social
structure. In a society oriented mainly towards being, the
having tendencies are starved and the being mode is fed. In a
society like ours, whose main orientation is towards having,
the reverse occurs. But the being mode of existence is always,
already present - though repressed. No Saul becomes a Paul

if he was not already a Paul before his conversion.

The change from having to being is actually a tipping of
the scales, when in connection with social change the new i.y
encouraged and the old discouraged. Besides, this is not a
question of a new Man as different from the old as the sky is
from the earth; it is a question of a change of direction, One

step in the new direction will be followed by the next, and
taken in the right direction, these steps mean everything.

Yet another encouraging aspect to consider is one that,
paradoxically, concerns the degree of alienation that charac¬
terises the majority of the population, including its leaders.
As pointed out in the earlier discussion of the ‘marketing
character’, the greed to have and to hoard has been modified
by the tendency to merely function well, to exchange oneself
as a commodity who is - nothing. It is easier for the alien¬
ated, marketing character to change than it is for the hoard¬
ing character, which is frantically holding on to possessions,
and particularly its ego.

A hundred years ago, when the major part of the popu¬
lation consisted of ‘independents’, the greatest obstacle to
change was the fear of and resistance to loss of property and
economic independence. Marx lived at a time when the
working class was the only large dependent class and, as
Marx thought, the most alienated one. Today, the vast ma¬
jority of the population is dependent; virtually all people
who work are employed (according to the 1970 U.S. Census
report, only 7.82 per cent of the total working population
over age sixteen is self-employed, i.e. ‘independent’); and -
at least in the United States - it is the blue-collar workers
who still maintain the traditional middle-class hoarding
character, and who, consequently, are less open to change
than is today’s more alienated middle class.

All this has a most important political consequence: while
socialism was striving for the liberation of all classes •• i.e.
striving for a classless society - its immediate appeal was to
the ‘working class’, i.e. the manual workers; today the work¬
ing class is (in relative terms) even more of a minority than it
was a hundred years ago. In order to gain power, the .social
democratic parties need to win the votes of many members
of the middle class, and in order to achieve this goal, the
socialist parties have had to cut back their programme from
one with a socialist vision to one offering liberal reforms. On
the other hand, by identifying the working class as the lever
of humanistic change, socialism necessarily antagonised the
members of all other classes, who felt that their properties
and privileges were going to be taken away by the workers.

195

Today, the appeal of the new society goes to all who suffer
from alienation, who are employed, and whose property is
not threatened. In other words, it concerns the majority of
the population, not merely a minority. It does not threaten
to take anybody’s property, and as far as income is
concerned, it would raise the standard of living of those
who are poor. High salaries for top executives would not
have to be lowered, but if the system worked, they would not
want to be symbols of times past.

Furthermore, -the ideals of the new society cross all party
lines: many conservatives have not lost their ethical and re¬
ligious ideals (Eppler calls them Value conservatives’), and
the same holds true of many liberals and leftists. Each politi¬
cal party exploits the voters by persuading tliem that it rep¬
resents the true values of humanism. Yet behind all political
parties are only two camps: those who care and those who
don’t care. If all those in the camp that cares could rid them¬
selves of party cliches and realise that they have the same
goals, the possibility of change would seem to be con¬
siderably greater; especially so since most citizens have
become less and less interested in party loyalty and party
slogans. People today are yearning for human beings who
have wisdom and convictions and the courage to act accord¬
ing to their convictions.

Given even these hopeful factors, however, the chance.s
for necessary human and social changes remain slim. Our
only hope lies in the energising attraction of a new vision. To
propose this or that reform that does not change the .system
is useless in the long run because it does not carry with it the
impelling force of a strong motivation. The ‘utopian’ goal is
more realistic than the ‘realism’ of today’s leaders. The re¬
alisation of the new society and new Man is possible only if
the old motivations of profit and power are replaced by new
ones: being, sharing, understanding; if the marketing
character is replaced by the productive, loving cliaracter; if
cybernetic religion is replaced by a new radical-humanistic
spirit. '

Indeed, for those who are not authentically rooted in the-
istic religion the crucial question is that of convetsion to a
humanistic ‘religiosity’ without religion, without dogmas

196

and institutions, a ‘religiosity’ long prepared by the move
ment of no„-the>stic religiosity, from the Buddha to K'
We .ue .»t C0.1 routed with the choice between S
materialism and the acceptance of thp Phriof-n

God.SociaUifei.e,f-i,,'allit:a;eS:i?^^^^^

pettonal relations - will be the expre.ssion of the lehW
spirit, .and no separate religion will be necessary. ^
demand for a new. non-theistic. non-institutionaliLd “
hgiosity IS not an attack on the existing religions. It does
mearr, however, that the Roman CathoKc Church T
pnning with the Roman bureaucracy, must convert its'df to
the spin of the gosjxJ. t doe, not mean that the ‘socialist

countries must e Socialised’, but that their fake socialism

shall be replaced by genuine humanistic socialism
Later Medieval culture flourished because people fol-
lowed the vision of the City 0/ God. Modern socieh flour-
islred because people were energised by the vision of the
growth of the harthly City 0/ Ptopm. In our century how¬
ever, this vision deteriorated to that ol the Totm 0 Babel
which is now beginning to collapse and will ultimately buiv
everybody in ilx ruins. II the City of God and the Earthly
City weie tlieiis and «nlit/it'.ri.r, a new syntluisis is the only
alternative to chaos 1 the synthc.,is between the .spiritual core
of the Late Medieval world and the development of rational
thought .uid .science since die Renaissance. Ibis synthesis is
The City oj Iking,

APPENDIX

World Perspectives

Wkt This Series Means

Board of Editors of World Perspectives

Erwin Chargaff 1 . 1 . Rabi

Lord Kenneth Clark Karl Rahner, S.J.

Sir Fred Hoyle Lewis Thomas

Adolph Lowe G. N. Yang

Joseph Needham Chiang Yee

It is the thesis of World Perspectives that man is in the
process of developing a new consciousness which, in spite of
his apparent spiritual and moral captivity, can eventually
lift the human race above and beyond the fear, ignorance,
and isolation which beset it today. It is to this nascent con*
sciousness, to this concept of man born out of a universe
perceived through a fresh vision of reality, that World Per-
spectives is dedicated.

My comments on this Series are not of course to be con¬
strued as a prefatory essay for each individual book. These
few pages simply attempt to set forth the general aim and
purpose of the Series as a whole. They try to point to the
principle of permanence within change and to define the
essential nature of man, as presented by those scholars who
have been invited to participate in this intellectual and
spiritual movement.

Man has entered a new era of evolutionary history, one in
which rapid change is a dominant consequence. His is con¬
tending with a fundamental change, since he has intervened
in the evolutionary process. He must now better appreciate
this fact and then develop the wisdom to direct the process
towards his fulfilment rather than towards his destruction.
As he learns to apply his understanding of the physical world
for practical purposes, he is, in reality, extending his innate
capacity and augmenting his ability and his need to com¬
municate as well as his ability to think and to create. And as

a result, he is substituting a goaWirected evolutionary
process m his struggle against environniental hardship for

the slow, but effective, biological evolution which produced
modern man through mutation and natural selection By in¬
telligent intervention in the evolutionary process man has
greatly expanded the range of his
possibilities. But he has not changed the basic fact that it
remains a trial and error process, with the danger of taking
paths that lead to sterility of mind and heart, moral apathy
and intellectual inertia; and even producing social dinosaurs
unfit to live in an evolving world.

Only those spiritual and intellectual leaders of our epoch
who have a paternity in this extension of man’s horizons are
invited to par ticipate in the Series; those who are aware of
the truth that beyond the divisiveness among men there
exists a primordial unitive power since we are all bound
together by a common humanity more fundamental than
any unity of dogma; those who recognise that the cen¬
trifugal force which has scattered and atomised mankind
must be replaced by an integrating structure and process
capable of bestowing meaning and purpose on existence;
those who realise that science itself, when not inhibited by
the limitations of its own methodology, when chastened and
humbled, commits man to an indeterminate range of yet
undreamed consequences that may flow from it.

Virtually all of our disciplines have relied on conceptions
which are now incompatible with the Cartesian axiom, and
with the static world view we once derived from it. For
underlying the new ideas, including those of modern physics,
is a unifying order, but it is not causality; it is purpose, and
not the purpo.se of the universe and of man, but the purpose
in the universe and in man. In other words, we seem to in¬
habit a world of dynamic process and structure. Therefore
we need a calculus of potentiality rather than one of prob¬
ability, a dialectic of polarity, one in which unity and diver¬
sity are redefined as simultaneous and necessary poles of the
same essence.

Our situation is new. No civilisation has previously had to
face the challenge of scientific specialisation, and our re¬
sponse must be new. Thus this Series is committed to ensure

199

that the spiritual and moral needs of a man as a human
being and the scientific and intellectual resources at his com"
mand for life may be brought into a productive, meaningful
and creative harmony.

In a certain sense we may say that man now has regained
his former geocentric position in the universe. For a picture
of the Earth has been made available from distant space,
from the lunar desert, and the sheer isolation of the Earth
has become plain. This is as new and as powerful an idea in
history as any that has ever been born in man’s con¬
sciousness. We are all becoming seriously concerned with our
natural environment. And this concern is not only the result
of the warnings given by biologists, ecologists and con¬
servationists. Rather it is the result of a deepening awareness
that something new has happened, that the planet Earth is a
unique and precious place. Indeed, it may not be a mere
coincidence that this awareness should have been born at the
exact moment when man took his first step into outer space.

This Series endeavours to point to a reality of which
scientific theory has revealed only one aspect. It is the com¬
mitment to this reality that lends universal intent to a scien¬
tist’s most original and solitary thought. By acknowledging
this frankly we shall restore science to the great family of
human aspirations by which men hope to fulfil themselves in
the world community as thinking and sentient beings. For
our problem is to discovers principle of differentiation and
yet relationship lucid enough to justify and to purify
scientific, philosophic and all other knowledge, both dis¬
cursive and intuitive, by accepting their interdependence.
This is the crisis in consciousness made articulate through
the crisis in science. This is the new awakening.

Each volume presents the thought and belief of its author
and points to the way in which religion, philosophy, art,
science, economics, politics and history may constitute that
form of human activity which takes the fullest and most
precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity and
difficulty. Thus World Perspectives endeavours to define
that ecumenical power of the mind and heart which enables
man through his mysterious greatness to re-create his life.

This Series is committed to a re-examination of all those

200

sides of human endeavour which the specialist was taught to
believe he could safely leave aside. It attempts to show the
structural kinship between subject and object; the in¬
dwelling of the one in the other. It interprets present and
past events impinging on human life in our growing World
Age and world consciousness and envisages what man may
yet attain when summoned by an unbending inner necessity
to the quest of what is most exalted in him. Its purpose is to
offer new vistas in terms of world and human development
while refusing to betray the 'intimate correlation between
universality and individuality, dynamics and form, freedom
and destiny. Each author deals with the increasing realis¬
ation that spirit and nature are not separate and apart; that
intuition and reason must regain their convergence as the
means of perceiving and fusing inner being with outer re-
ality.

World Perspectives endeavours to show that the con¬
ception of w'holeness, unity, organism is a higher and more
concrete conception than that of matter and energy. Thus
an enlarged meaning of life, of biology, not as it is revealed
in the test tube of the laboratory but as it is experienced
within the organism of life itself, is attempted in this Series.
For the principle of life consists in the tension which con¬
nects spirit with the realm of matter, symbiotically joined.
The element of life is dominant in the very texture of nature,
thus rendering life, biology, a transempirical science. The
laws of life have their origin beyond their mere physical
manifestations and compel us to consider their spiritual
source. In fact, the widening of the conceptual framework
has not only served to restore order within the respective
branches of knowledge, but has also disclosed analogies in
man’s position regarding the analysis and synthesis of ex¬
perience in apparently separated domains of knowledge, sug¬
gesting the possibility of an ever more embracing objective
description of the meaning of life.

Knowledge, it is shown in these books, no longer consists
in a manipulation of man and nature as opposite forces, nor
in the reduction of data to mere statistical order, but is a
means of liberating mankind from the destructive power of
fear, pointing the way towards the goal of the rehabilitation

201

of the human will and the rebirth of faith and confidence in
the human person. The works published also endeavour to
reveal that the cry for patterns, systtmis and authorities is
growing less insistent tis the dtisim grows stronger in both
East and West for the recovery of a dignity, integrity and
self-realisation which are the inalienalik; rights of man who
may now guide change by means of conscious purpose in the
light of rational ex|jerience.

The volumes in this Sericts endeavour to demonstrate that
only in a society in which awanmess of tlie prolilems of
science exists, can its discoveries start gretit wave’s of change
in human culture, and in such a manner that these dis¬
coveries may deepen and not erode tlie sense of universal
human community. TIk; dilferences in the <liscipliries, their
epistemological exclusiveiK'ss, the variety of historical ex¬
periences, the dilferences of traditions, of cultures, of
languages, of the arts, slKnild Lx* jirotta'.ted and preserved.
But tlie interrelationship and unity of the whole should at
the same time be accepted.

The authors of World Pmfmims are of course aware
that the ultimate answtms to the hopes and fears wliich per¬
vade modern society rest on the moral fibre of man, and on
the wisdom and reH{)oiisibilily of those wlio promote the
course of its developmimt. But moral decisions cannot dis¬
pense with an insight into tlie interplay of the olijectivc ele¬
ments which oder and limit the choices made. Therefore an
understanding of what tlie issues are, thoutfh not a sufficient
condition, is a necessary prereciuisiui for directing action
towards constructive solutions.

Other vital questions explored relate to iiroblems of inter¬
national understanding as well as to prolilems dealing with
prejudice and the resultant tensions and antagonisms. The
growing perception and resjionsiliilily of our World Age
point to the new reality that the individual person and the
collective person supplement and integrate each other; that
the thrall of totalitarianism of both Itdt ami rigfit has been
shaken in the universal desire to recapture tlie authority f)f
truth and human totality. Mankind can finally place it.s trust
not in a proletarian authoritarianism, not in a secularised
humanism, both of which have betrayed the .spiritual

property right of history, but in a sacramental brotherhood
and in the unity of knowledge. This new consciousness has
created a widening of human horizons beyond every par¬
ochialism, and a revolution in human thought comparable
to the_ basic assumption, among the ancient Greeks, of the
.sovereignty of reason; corresponding to the great effulgence
of the moral conscience articulated by the Hebrew prophets;
analogous to the fundamental assertions of Christianity; or
to the beginning of the new scientific era, the era of the
science of dynamics, the experimental foundations of which
were laid by Galileo in the Renaissance.

An important effort of this series is to re-examine the con¬
tradictory meanings and applications which are given today
to such terras as democracy, freedom, justice, love, peace,
brotherhood and God. The purpose of such inquiries is to
clear the way for the foundation of a genuine world history
not in terms of nation or race or culture but in terms of man
in relation to God, to himself, his fellow man and the uni¬
verse, that reach beyond immediate self-interest. For the
meaning of the World Age consists in respecting man’s hopes
and dreams which lead to a deeper understanding of the
basic values of all peoples.

World Perspectives is planned to gain insight into the
meaning of man, who not only is determined by history but
who also determines history. History is to be understood as
concerned not only with the life of man on this planet but as
including also such cosmic influences as interpenetrate our
human world. This generation is discovering that history
does not conform to the social optimism of modern civi¬
lisation and that the organisation of human communities
and the esteblishment of freedom and peace are not only
intellectual achievements but spiritual and moral achieve¬
ments as well, demanding a cherishing of the wholeness of
human personality, the ‘unraediated wholeness of feeling
and thought’, and constituting a never-ending challenge to
man, emerging from the abyss of meaninglessness and
suffering, to be renewed and replenished in the totality of his

life. . . ,

Justice itself, which has been ‘in a state of pilgrimage and
crucifixion’ and now is being slowly liberated from the grip

of social and political demonologies in the East as well as in
the West, begins to question its own premises. The modern
revolutionary movements which have challenged the sacred
institutions of society by protecting injustice in the name of
social justice are here examined and re-evaluated.

In the light of this, we have no choice but to admit that
the unfreedom against which freedom is measured must be
retained with it, namely, that the aspect of truth out of
which the night view appears to emerge, the darkness of our j

time, is as little abandonable as is man’s subjective advance. j

Thus the two sources of man’s consciou.sness are inseparable, |

not as dead but as living and complementary, an aspect of
that ‘principle of complementarity’ through which Niels
Bohr has sought to unite the quantum and the wave, both of
which constitute the very fabric of life’s radiant energy.

There is in mankind today a coiinterforce to the sterility
and danger of a quantitative, anonymous mass culture; a j

new, if sometimes imperceptible, spiritual sense of con- i

vergence towards human and world unity on the basis of the j

sacredness of each human person and respect for the plural- j

ity of cultures. There is a growing awareness that equality [

may not be evaluated in mere numerical terms but is pro- |

portionate and analogical in its reality. For when equality is |

equated with interchangeability, individuality is negated i

and the human person transmuted into a faceless mask. i

We stand at the brink of an age of a world in which |

human life presses forward to actualise new forms. The false |

separation of man and nature, of time and .space, of freedom j

and security, is acknowledged, and we are faced with a new j

vision of man in his organic unity and of history offering a j;
richness and diversity of equality and majesty of .scope hith- j
erto unprecedented. In relating the accumulated wisdom of j
man’s spirit to the new reality of the World Age, in articu- j

lating its thought and belief. World Perspectives seeks to j

encourage a renaissance of hope in .society and of pride in j
man’s decision as to what his destiny will be,

Man has certainly contrived to change the environment, ' j
but subject to the new processes involved in this change, the i
same process of selection continues to operate. The environ- :, |
ment has changed partly in a physical and geographical j;

sense, but more particularly from the knowledge we now
possess. The Biblical story of Adam and Eve contains a deep
lesson, which a casual reading hardly reveals. Once the ‘fruit
of the Tree of Knowledge’ has been eaten, the world is
changed. The new world is dictated by the knowledge itself,
not of course by an edict of God. The Biblical story has
further interest in that the new world is said to be much
worse than the former idyllic state of ignorance. Today we
are beginning to wonder whether this might not also be true.
Yet we are uneasy, apprehensive, and our fears lead to the
collapse of civilisations, Thus we turn to the truth that
knowledge and life are indivisible, even as life and death are
inseparable. We are what we know and think and feel; we
are linked with history^ with the world, with the universe,
and faith in Life creates its own verification.

World Perspectives is committed to the recognition that
all great changes are preceded by a vigorous intellectual re-
evaluation and reorganisation. Our authors are aware that
the sin of hubris may be avoided by showing that the creat¬
ive process itself is not a free activity if by free we mean
arbitrary, or unrelated to cosmic law, For the creative
process in the human mind, the developmental process in
organic nature and the basic laws of the inorganic realm
may be but varied expressions of a universal formative
process. Thus World Perspectives hopes to show that al¬
though the present apocalyptic period is one of exceptional
tensions, there is also at work an exceptional movement
towards a compensating unity which refuses to violate the
ultimate moral power at work in the universe, that very
power upon which all human effort must at last depend. In
this way we may come to understand that there exists an
inherent interdependence of spiritual and mental growth
which, though conditioned by circumstances, is never deter¬
mined by circumstances. In this way the great plethora of
human knowledge may be correlated with an insight into the
nature of human nature by being attuned to the wide and
deep range of human thought and human experience.

Incoherence is the result of the present disintegrative pro¬
cesses in education. Thus the need for World Perspectives
expresses itself in the recognition that natural and man-

made ecological systems require as much study as isolated
particles and elementary reactions. For there is a basic cor-
relation of elements in nature as in man which cannot be
separated, which compose each other and alter each other |

mutually. Thus we hope to widen appropriately our con- j

ceptual framework of reference. For our epistemological 1

problem consists in our finding the proper balance between j

our lack of an all-embracing principle relevant to our way of |

evaluating life and in our power to express ourselves in a |

logically consistent manner. ^ j

Our Judeo-Ghristian and Greco-Roman heritage, our |

Hellenic tradition, has compelled us to think in exclusive |

categories. But our experience chslknge.s us to recognise a ;

totality richer and far more complex than the average ob- i

server could have suspected ~ a totality which compels him j

to think in ways which the logic of dichotomies denies. We |

are summoned to revise fundamentally our ordinary ways of j

conceiving experience, and thus, by expanding our vision
and by accepting those forms of thought which also include |
non-exclusive categories, the mind i.s then able to grasp what |
it was incapable of grasping or accepting before. _ i

Nature operates out of nece.ssity; there is no alternative
in nature, no will, no freedom, no choice as there is for man. j

Man must have convictions and values to live for, and this |

also is recogni.sed and accepted by those scientists who are at j

the same time philosophers. For they then realise that duty |

and devotion to our task, be it a task of acting or of under- j

standing, will become weaker and rarer unless guidance is
sought in a metaphysics that transcends our historical and ;
scientific views or in a religion that transcends and yet per- I

vades the work we are carrying on in the light of day. i

For the nature of knowledge, whether scientific or ontol- -
ogical, consists in reconciling meaning and being. And being
signifies nothing other than the actualisation of potentiality,
self-realisation which keeps in tune with the transformation.

This leads to experience in terms of the individual; and to i
organisation and patterning in terms of the universe. Thus . i.
organism and world actualise themselves simultaneously, i
And so we may conclude that organism is being enduring b
in time, in fact in eternal time, since it does not have its

beginning with procreation, nor with birth, nor does it end
with death. Energy and matter in whatever form they may
manifest themselves are_ transtemporal and transspatial and
are therefore metaphysical. Man as man is summoned to
know what is right and what is wrong, for emptied of such
knowledge he is unable to decide what is better or what is
worse.

World Perspectives hopes to show that human society is
different from animal societies, which, having reached a cer¬
tain stage, are no longer progressive but are dominated by
routine and repetition. Thus man has discovered his own
nature, and with this self-knowledge he has left the state of
non-age and entered manhood. For he is the only creature
who is able to say not only ‘no’ to life but ‘yes’ and to make
for himself a life that is human. In this decision lie his
burden and his greatness. For the power of life or death lies
not only in the tongue but in man’s recently acquired ability
to destroy or to create life itself, and therefore he is faced
with unlimited and unprecedented choices for good and for
evil that dominate our time. Our common concern is the
very destiny of the human race. For man has now intervened
in the process of evolution, a power not given to the pre-
Socratics, nor to Aristotle, nor to the Prophets in the East or
the West, nor to Copernicus, nor to Luther, Descartes, or
Machiavelli, Judgments of value must henceforth direct
technological change, for without such values man is div¬
ested of his humanity and of his need to collaborate with the
very fabric of the universe in order to bestow meaning, pur¬
pose, and dignity upon his existence. Np time must be lost
since the wavelength of change is now shorter than the life¬
span of man.

In spite of the infinite obligation of men and in spite of
their finite power, in spite of the intransigence of national¬
isms, and in spite of the homelessness of moral passions ren¬
dered ineffectual by the technological outlook, beneath the
apparent turmoil and upheaval of the present, and out of the
transformations of this dynamic period with the unfolding
of a world-consciousness, the purpose of World Perspectives
is to help quicken the ‘unshaken heart of well-rounded truth’
and interpret the significant elements of the World Age now

taking shape out of the core of that undiramed continuity of
the creative process which restores man to mankind while
deepening and enhancing his communion and his symbiotic
relationship with the universe.

Ruth Nanda Anshen

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215

Index

Aaron, 58
Abraham, 55, no
activity, 14-15, 34, 54, yS-g,
92-100,103-5, i35» 159,160,
177 _

advertising and propaganda,
127-8, 175, 183-4;
communications, media
alienation, 14-15, 29, 31, 40,
4 i> 46-7? 94 j 95 - 6 , 107-8,
in-12, 114, 123-6, 147-9,
i 55 »/_ 59 > 165,195; dsQ

passivity

antagonism, 112-17; class war,
15-16,115-16,171
Aquinas, St Thomas, 16, 65,
96, 122-3,122?;, 125
Aristippus, 13-14
Aristotle, 13,95-6,97
Artz, Frederick B,, 139-40
Auer, Alfons, 122, i22fi, 125
Augustme, St, 125,140
authority, exercise of, 44-7,83,
86, 87-8,121,122-3,124-5,
i 45> I55» 186-7, 188, 189;
and children, 20, 44, 45-6,
76, 81, 85, 122, 182, 188;
sexual prohibitions, 84-5;
see also bureaucracy; patriar¬
chal society; property; re¬
bellion and revolution
automobile, importance of, 15,

36,77-8,175.176

Baader, Franz von, 152
Bachofen, J. J., 144

Bacon, VvmkiKoimi OriumRi,

171

Basho, 26, 27,28
Basilius, 64
Bauer, Edgar, 30
Becker, Carl, u|3
behaviourism, 70, loo
being (mode of exisleno''}, 2%
32, 33,. 91-109, itW-o;
authority, uy,
concept, 55-65
also New Tt-uaeii'm; (bd
Testament); in dtily cxri’ri-
encc, 37-51, itU
exists in the l;“re arr!

127-8; and fait::,

128; freedom aiki grov,!.*!,
II, 34-5, 81-2, 83-4 11!,
168, i86”8; happini-FS mu
plet^ure, 103-4, idi-io f..w-
sim, 168; and havinii, diifer-
ence between. 25 •■36, 91,
103, loS; and having,
tential, 90; interest, 'jS-q, .|i,
103-4, 167; kaowkdfic,

47-9; knowledge c 4 ' reality,
32. 33. 34-5. 39-44 47^8.
67-9, 100-2, 165; in lan¬
guage and speech, 3.1-3. .-ji;
and learning, 37--9, ! 0 ;r- 4 ;
life, affirmation of, 23,30,33,
106-7, 111-12, 126-7, ’- 61 );
philosophical concepts of,
34-5; and reading, 43, 44;
and remembering, 39-41,
128; security, 110-11, 112,

217

being - miiinud
167,171, liifrG; and sex, 52,

53-4, 116-17,118; solidarity
and union, 3») 3'b 106-8,

112-17,167,185; well-being
and joy, * 5 , 28, 96,
112-13, ny-ao, 528,167,
171, 194; dso activity;
Buddha; Eckhart, Master;
Jesus; love/loving; Marx,
Karl

Beiiveniste, Emile, 32-3
Benz, E., 70
Bible, 14, 139; «

Testament; Old Testament
Blakney, Raymond B., 48,
(iffilpassim, seo
Bloch, Ernst, vpi, 153
Bohr, Niels, 149
Bonifacius, St, 139
Brentano, I.. V., 75 n
Buddha, 29, 106, no, 160,
197; being and having, con¬
cept of, 25, 47) 48) 66, 82,
lofi, 118-19, 126,165
Budclliisra, 34-5 ‘Old «, 102,
65 and n, nB, i52) 165;
Zen, 26,27, 28,29
Budinor, Moshe, 4t«
bureaucracy, 12, t 5 ) 44 ) 49 »

, 116,171,180,181-3,186

capitalism (and need for
change), 15, 16, 20, 170-1,
172-4, 176-7; ‘marketing
character,’ 79, I 4 r)‘" 5 ''^)

19G; sue also consumption;
economic change, need for;
industrial society
Cavdl, Edith, 140
children, 87, t03, 1375

authority over and domina¬

tion of, 20, 44, 45~6, 76,02,
84, 85, 122, 182, 188; and
love, 52, 113, 144
China, 13, 17,81, 141
Chomsky, Noam, 30
Christianity, 62, 82, 102, 119,
138-42, If)!) 15'^) E 64 ) *85;
early Christians and church
lathers, 60-5 passim, 124-5,
140; heroes and martyrs,
140-1; as ideology, 49 - 5 T)
77, 142; paradise, 87; Pas¬
sion Play, Hr, projieity,
rejection of, 6i, 63, 64-5;
Protestant revolt, 143, * 44 )
145; sin, concept of, 120-5;
see dso Bible; God, concept
of; Jesus; Roman Catholic
Church

Chrysostomiis (St John Chryso¬
stom), 64

Churchill, Sir Winston, 104
class war, 16,1*5-16,17*

The (hid of Unknowing, 39, 48)
5 <>) 96

Glul) of Horae reports m-

Meadows, I) Ji.;Mesarovic,

M. D.; Pcstel, Eduard
Cohen, Kermann, 153 _
communications, media, 12,

I 4 -J 5 ) 36. 87, *905

tising and propaganda, 127,

* 74 )^ 75 )^ 83-4
communism, ii, *6, Bi, 100,
*34) if)6. *72; early com¬
munist sects, 64,65; Mtirxist
thought perverted by, 25 )
153, 155-7; we fl/wconsum{j-

tion

consumption (and necrl lor
change), *1, *5) ’‘6, 36) 77 )
79, 111” 12, 128, 148, 170,

172-7, 183-4, *93“4) dso
having, acquisition and con¬
sumption
Crusades, 141

Darwin, Charles, 148
Dead Sea Scrolls, 63
death, 25, 118-19, 126-7;
desire for immortality, 86,
87, iq6; see also sacrifice
Delgado, Jose M. R., 45
de Mause, Lloyd, 52
depression, 15, 98, 114, 119,

193

destructiveness, 15, 17, 85, 86,
-108, 168; see also ecology,
dangers to; rebellion and
revolution; war
Diogenes Laertius, 13,126
‘Diognetus, Letter of’, 64
(Pseudo) Dionysius Areopagita,

50

Disraeli, Benjamin, 152
drugs/drug addiction, 14, 36,
117, 184, 186
Du Marais, 29-30,33

Eckhart, Master, 29, 65-71,
126,139, 160; being and
having, concept of, 25,47-8,
66-71 passim, 96, 100, 117,
119-20, 126, 154, 160; God,
concept of, 50—1, 66, 67,
68-9

ecology, dangers to, 12,17-18,
147, 152, 162, 163, 184, 192
economic change, need for, 12,
17-19,89,106-7, *70) * 72 - 3 )
184-6

education, 43-4, 45-6, 48-9,
103; see also learning
ego/egoism, 13, i 5 -i 7 » 35 ) 77 )

80,106,109,111,145,146-7;
fame and success, 19-20, 87,
98; ‘identity crisis’, 147; see
also authority, exercise of
Ehrlich, Anne H., 162-4, *93
Ehrlich, Paul R., 162-4, *93
Eichmann, Adolf, 181-2
Einstein, Albert, 149
Engels, Friedrich, 156; The
Holy Family, 30,99
Enlightenment, 48,143,152
Epicurus, 13,126
Eppler, E., 163,196

faith, 49-51,128
fanaticism, 89,107
Farner, Konrad, 64!!

Finkelstein, Louis, 60
Eiser, Z., 34^

freedom and growth, 34-5,111,
168; and breaking bonds, 11,
81, 83-6,186-8; fear of, no,
III; see also activity; rebel¬
lion and revolution
French Revolution, 134
Freud, Sigmund, 13, 35, 87-8,
100, 103, 166, 187, 188;
awareness of unconscious
reality, 39-40, 47, 48,100
Fromm, Erich; The Anatomy of
Human Destructiveness, 54,78,
I03«, iByn; The Art of
Loving, 53; The Dogma oj
Christ, 60; Escape from Freer
dom, 45, 94re, non, i33n;
The Forgotten Language, 58)1,
102; Man for Himself 51,
90, 145; Marx's Concept of
Man, 155, 155**) *56; ‘On
the Limitations and Dangers
of Psychology’, gin; Psy¬
choanalysis and Religion, i33n;

Fromm, Erich “Con/mM£’</

7 k Revolution of Hope, 164;
The Sane Society, 164, 178,
185,185?!; ‘Sex and Charac¬
ter’, 117; Socialist Humanism,
158ft; Toil Shall Be as Gods,
58ft, 11% 125
Funk, Rainer, 6i«, 63, 124

Germany, 104,106, 140,181
God, concept of, 50, 55, 56, 60,
61-2, 67, 68, 120-1, 125,
139 ; as an idol, 4()-50, 77
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von,
27-8, 140

j,50vcrntnent and politics, i i-i 2,
19, 46, 87, 88-9, 99, 116,
i20‘-5/ftMAWi, 149,196; com¬
munications, control of, 12,
183--4, 189-90; democracy,
participatory, lyy-fli, 191;
rebellion and revolution, 80,
Bi-2 , 106, 107, 134; see also
authority, exercise of;
bureaucracy; war
Greece, ancient: mythology,
jn, i 2I"3, 140-2; philo¬
sophy and thought, 13, 34,
95-6,97,122-3,126
Groddek, George, 117

happiness and pleasure: in
being, 103-4,116-20 /w.m7V«,
I OB; {see also activity; well-
. being and joy); in having,
13-16 passim, 36, 117-20,
171, 183-4,
passivity)

Harich, W., 164 : ^

having (mode of existence),
75-90; acquisition and con¬
sumption, 35-6, 37-8, 41,
69, 75-82, 83-6, 87-8, 92-3,

108, no, 111-12 {see also
consumption; property); an¬
tagonism, 112-17; and being,
change to, 165-9; and being,

' dilTerencc between, 25-36,
91, 103, 10B-9; biblical con¬
cept 55“6, 58-60, 62-5 (m-
also New Testament; Old
'I’estament); in daily ex¬
perience, 37-54> 127-9;

death, fear of, and desire for
immortality, 86, 87, 126-7;
depression, 15, 98, 114, 119,
193; destructiveness, 15, 17,
85, 86, 108, 168 {see also
ecology, dangers to; war);
existential having, 90; exists
in time, i27-<); and faith,
49-51; happiness and pleas¬
ure, passim, ^6, 117-20,
171, 183-4, 187; insecurity,
110-12, 126-7, 167; know¬
ledge, 47-9, 69; in language
and speech, 31-2, 41-3, 86;
and learning, 37-8, 103-4;
loneliness, 15, 107, ni, 114;
passivity, 15, 20, 36, 52-4,
79) 129; and read¬

ing, 43-4; and sex, 15, 36,
84, 113, 117, 118,^ 183-4,
189; see also alienation; au¬
thority, exercise of; Buddha;
Eckhart, Master; egi»/(*g-
oism; Jesus; love/loving;
Marx, Karl; patriarcliul soc¬
iety

health, 20,77,79,84,103,111,
186

Hebb,D.O.,i03

hedonism, passim, 118

Hegel, Georg W. F., 34

Heisenberg, Werner, 149

Fleraclitus, 34

heroes, 55, iio-ii, 121, 140-2
Hess, Max, 155
Hinduism, 50-1, no, 151
Hobbes, Thomas, 14
liomer, 111, 141
humanism (and social change),
16-17, 47-8, 122-3, 139)
M'3) 152; present-day/radi¬
cal, 18-19, 143. 152-64,
181-3; olso Marx, Karl
Ilunziger, Max, 92

Ibsen, Henrik: PeerGynt, in
lllich, Ivan, 49

immortality, desire for, 86, 87,
126

income: equality, 88-9;

guaranteed yearly, 185-6
industrial society (and ‘cyber¬
netic religion*), 11-12,15-17,
75-6, 98-9, 129, 145, 151-2;
protests against, 143-4, 152-
(>4, 177-8, 180, 181, 183-4,
196; see also capitalism; con¬
sumption; economic change,
need lor

insecurity, no-12,126-7,167
interest, 3B-40,42,83,104,167
Islam, 87,143

Jacobi, E, R., iGoft
Jesus: being and liaving, con¬
cept of, 25, 47-8, 60, 61,
62-3, Ilf), 124, 126; as
‘hero’ of love, n i, 140; as an
idol, 142; see also Christi¬
anity; New Testament
Jochanan him Sakai, 59
■ joy see well-being and joy
Judaism, 55-61 passim; being
and having, concept ot) 47-B,

82, 102, no-ii, 112, n8,
119, 120-1, 140, 154; God,
concept of, 50-1, 55, 56-7,
58-9; Hasidic movement,
119; Maimonides, Code of,
* 53 ) 1544 Messianic Time,
I?) 58, 59) 61-2, 119, 153,
171; Shabbat, 56-8, 119;
Talmud, 56, 57, 60, 62, 102,
119; see also Old Testament
Jung, Carl Gustav, 29
Justin, St, 64

Kant, Immanuel, 14
Khrushchev, Nikita, 156
knowledge/knowing, 47-9, 69;
reality, 32, 33, 34-5, 40,
47-8, 67-8, 100-2, 165;
Supreme Cultural Council,
establishment of, 189, 190-1
Koestler, Arthur, 20
Kropotkin, P. A., 105ft

La Mettrie, Julien Offroy de,

14

Lange, Winfried, gGft.
language and speech, 29-33,
38-9,41-3, 86

learning, 37-9, 86, 103-4;
reading, 43-4; see a/,ve edu¬
cation; knowledge/knowing
Lenin, Nikolai, 134, 172
life, affirmation and love of, 25,
29 " 30 ) 33) 107. 108, 112,
126-7, 167-8; and desire for
immortality, 86,87,126
Lobkowicz, Nicholas, 95, 96ft
loneliness, 15, 108, in, 114
love/bving: as atonement for
sin, 123-5; •^cing, 30, 31,
48, 51-2, 53, 67, 69, 86,
105-6, 107, III, 112, 128,

non

I hvtllovin^-continued Millan, Ignacio, 150^

I V 142,144,167; of children, 52, Morgan, L. H., 144

I 113, 144; fadierly/motherly, Moses, 55, 56, 58-9, no,

1 ■ 144; in having, 52-3, 54 j 7^) 11118

f 77,111,113-14,124,127, Mumford, Lewis, 164,180

[ 144; idea vs. experience, 34;

! marriage; sex nature, 17, 107, 168; see also

. Lubec, Henri de, 124,125 ecology, dangers to

i Luther, Martin, 144,145 New Testament, 60-5 passim,

I 119, 154; see also Christi-

Maccoby, Michael, I04fi, 149- unity; Jesus
50 nuclear weapons and danger ol

! Maimonides, Code of, 153-4 war, 12,19,106,147,151-2,

i ‘Man and His Environment’, 163,184,192,193

; 164 Nyanaponika Mahatera, 65«

Marcuse, Herbert, 80

^ ‘marketing character’, 79,145- Old Testament, 55'~6o, 64-5,

f 52, 195, 196 119, 154; Book of Psalms,

j marriage, 52,53,76,77,182 119 and n.; ‘burning bush’,

I martyrs, 107,121,140,141 paradox of, 112; the Fall,

1 Maix, Karl, 14, 34-5n., 56, 123, 125; God, concept of,

j 69, 153-7 pm, 160, 172, 50-L 55= 565 58,125; Tower

I 197; and alienation, 149, of Babel, 125

I 155) 165, 195; being and Olympic Games, 142

i ' knowing reality, concept of, Origenes, 124

[ 25 , 47 ) 48 ) 99 ) 100 ) 155 =

I 165-6; Cflpiffl/, 153-4; iScoK' Parmenides, 34

1 omic and Philosophiccd Manu- passivity 15, 20, 36, 53, 54, 79)

I scripts, 88, 89, 99, 155??., 93-100, 129; Jeu ato aliena>

I ■ 155-6; Grundrisse, 99; The tion

Holy Family, 30, 99; ideas patriarchal society, 76-7, 144.=
perverted by communists and 145; domination of women
socialists, 25-6,153,156,157 and their liberation, ii, 76,
Maximus Confessor, St,.124 81,141, 182, 186-9

Mayo, Elton, 104 Paul, St, 69

Meadows, D, H., 18,161, 164 Pestel, Eduard, 18, 161, 164,

memory jre remembering 193

Mesarovic, M. D., 18,161,164, Phelps, Edmund S., io6«.

193 Piaget, Jean, qo

Middle Ages, 16, 29, 139, 143, Plato, 34
152,197 pleasure see happiness and

t’ Mieth, Dietmar, 69,96/1 pleasure

222

politics see government and
politics

primitive societies, 16, 29, 35,
45=46,84,87,185
Prometheus, 121
property, 69, 75-82, 85-6, 87,
no, in, 116, 154-5; people
treated as, 53, 76-7, 79, 84;
rejection of, 61,63,64-5,139
Protestant revolt, 143,144,145

Quint, Joseph L., 65-70 passim

reading, 43-4

reality, knowledge of, 32, 33,
34-5= 40, 47-9= 67-8, loo-q,
see also Buddha; Eck-
hart, Master; Jesus; Marx,
Karl

rebellion and revolution, 80,
81-2, 83-6, 100, 102, 106-7,
134, 188; see also children;
destructiveness; sex; women
religion,_8o, 88, 107, 116,118-

19; faith, 49-51; fakers, 149;
as an ideology, 122,135,138,
142; life after death, 87;
mysticism, 139; sin, concept
of, 84, 120-5; also Bud¬
dhism; Christianity; Flindu-
isra; Islam; Judaism
religion, ‘cybernetic’/'indus-
trial’ see industrial society
(and ‘cybernetic religion’)
‘religiosity’, godlcss/humanis-
tic/non-institutional/non-
theistic, 160, 196, 197
‘religious’ needs, fulfilment of,
134-8, 196--7

remembering, 39-41,127,128
Renaissance, 13, 139-40, 143,

152

revolution see rebellion and
revolution
Ricardo, David, 15
Roman Catholic Church, 16,
62,84,124, 139, 143, 144-5,
197; see also Aquinas, St
Thomas; Christianity
Roman Empire, 13, 106,139
Russia, 81, 106, 134; see also
Union of Soviet Socialist Re¬
publics

sacrifice, 105, 107, 109, 122,
140, 141

Sade, Marquis de, 14
Schecter, David E., 85
Schilling, Otto, 63«, 64/2
Schrodinger, E., 149
Schulz, Siegried, 61
Schumacher, E. F., 18, 148,
162,163

Schumacher, H., 63«
Schumpeter, Joseph, 180
Schweitzer, Albert, 12,14,100,
158-60

scientific research and thought,

35,62,148-9,171,191
security, no-12, 167, 171,
185-6

sex: in being mode, 52, 54,
116-17,118; in having mode,

15 = 36,84, 113-14, U7, iiB,
183-4, 189; suppression and
breaking of tabus, 82, 84-5, :
^ 188-9

Simmel, George, 34
sin, concept of, 84-5, 8g, 119-
25

social character, 83, loi, 108-9,

121) 133-5; hnarkoting char¬
acter’, 79, 145-52, 195, 196;
need for change, 19, 20,

social character - continued
i43~4, 152-^7; and ‘reli¬
gious* needs, 134-8,
see also authority, exercise oi;
humanism; patriarchal soc¬
iety; rebellion and revolution
socialism, 11, 20, 80, 99, 116,
i 33 -- 4 > 152 - 3 ) 158-7) 183-4,
172, 194) 195) 197; I^larxis*:
thought perverted, 153, 156,
157; see also cCnsurnption;
Marx, Karl

solidarity and union, 29-3^1,33)
107-8, 112-17,167, 184-5
Sombart, Werner, 75?!
Sommerlad, T., 64/?

Spinoza, Bened ictus
97-9,100,120,127
, Stalin, Joseph, 134
Stirner, Max, 77
Suzuki, D. T., 26-7, H2,119
Sweden, 175, 177 •

Szillard, Leo, 149

de, 14,

Talmud, 56, 57, 60, 62, 102,
119

Tawney, R. H., 75n
‘Technologic und.Politik*, 164
television, 15, 36, 184; see also
communications, media
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 26,27,

28

i Tertullian, 64,

Theobald, Robert, 185, i85«
Thoreau, Henry David, 14
time, 127-9'

Titmuss, Richard, ■'105-6«
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 143
' Toscanini, Arturo, 41 „ „ ,
30AU:flV£P.’.lTytnaASY

DoDation

Union of Soviet Socialist Re¬
publics, 20, 104, 134) 184,
'172, 175, 184, 186; see also
communism; Russia
United States, 106, 141,

149-5O) 173 ) 178) 184) 187,
■' I 92 )i 95 _

Utilitarianism, 14
Utz, A. F., 60,63«, 64

Vedas, 51
Vietnam war, 184

war, 16, 104-5, 107, 109, 141,
142, 171, 184; class war, 16,
115, 171; nuclear weapons
and danger of war, 12, 19,
106, 147, 151-2, 163, 184,
191)192

Weber, Max, 60,75«
well-being and joy, 14, 15, 28,
96, 113, 117--20, 128, 167,
194; see also happiness and
pleasure

women: male domination and
liberation of, 11, 76,81,141,
182, 187-8; motherly love,
144

work, 14, 103, 104, 105, 145,
170; ‘marketing character’,

79 ) 145-52, 195 ) 198
World War, First, 105,107,141
World War, Second, 104, 141,
181

Yerkes, A. V., 136
Yerkes, R. M„ 136
youth, 79-81, 106,107, 188

Zen Buddhism, 26,27,28,29

.

224 .